Texting has become so important to the way we communicate we have even begun to shorten or abbreviate entire words to make them easier to type as shorthand texts.

While texting may be an easy way to ask your friend which bar they plan on frequenting this weekend, this popular system of writing is threatening our English proficiency in professional and educational environments.

“I have seen several instances where my students use improper grammar and mix in the text talk in my English composition course,” said Erika Sparby, English doctoral candidate and teaching assistant. “The most common error I have seen is when students fail to use apostrophes appropriately if at all. As well, punctuation seems to be greatly affected by what appears to be a student’s influence from text messaging.”

During the spring semester I served as a teacher’s assistant for an education class. I was responsible for proofreading assignments before sending them forward for the final grade of the professor. I was flabbergasted by the large amounts of the use of “LOL,” “gr8,” “u” and other forms of texting shorthand.

It amazed me that college students at this school are falling back from their knowledge of proper English and have become so lax at correcting their spelling and punctuation.

What was even more amazing was it wasn’t only freshmen making these mistakes, but also a large number of upperclassmen had substituted text-talk into their academic papers.

“People seem to be losing their ability to capitalize and punctuate correctly,” said junior English major Jason Reynen. “This has a major effect on their fellow students, especially when it comes down to doing a peer review on a paper. A lot of the students’ sentence structure seems to be choppier, especially when it comes to the use of adjectives which greatly takes away the descriptive power in a sentence.”

This apparent inability to use proper English and replacing it with texting-based grammar in academia is quite frightening in my opinion. How is it that students who have been taught grammar rules and spelling for the past 12 grades are able to so easily forget and neglect those lessons here in college, where they matter the most?

It is a combination of laziness, apathy and ignorance to the reality of what is soon to come for those of us about to graduate.

People simply cannot expect to be able to hold down a job if they insert texting shorthand like “u,” or any other slang, in a professional document and neglect to use apostrophes for formal contractions like “I’m.”

It’s just not possible. We need to identify this issue and kill it before it gets any worse. We can’t continue to ignore our very evident neglegence of proper punctuation and spelling.

I’m not saying texting is necessarily a bad thing. It definitely helps to be able to send a text message to someone when you are in a situation like when you’re in a library and need to maintain a quiet work environment.

But we must take control of our use of proper grammar and save the texting shorthand for when it’s appropriate. Most importantly, we absolutely have to keep it out of academia and the workforce or else we are doomed for failure.