I walked into my English class this morning, not expecting perfect grammar, but at least plausible grammar. Thrown around “LOLs” and “Whatcha doin’ tomorrow night?” is what I heard however.

Sure, this lingo is extremely useful in online conversations and text messaging when the writer is trying to convey a message, a feeling, or some personality while typing very fast. Yet, these abbreviations of the English language are becoming harmful as they seep into daily face-to-face conversations and written papers for school.

This informal written communication walks the line of being fine when it is in between peers, but in school or for school-related works is completely unacceptable. We have learned the rules for proper punctuation and grammatical sentence structures, but us using them seems to be a different story.

Because of these short and brief “talks” that teenagers engage in through electronic media and messaging, varied vocabulary has decreased. Perhaps the decline of reading books has also contributed to this. We may know many words to describe something, but we often try to simplify everything since it conveys a similar message in an abbreviated form. For example, sites such as Twitter only allow 140 characters to be in “tweets”, which often results in no punctuation and shortened spelling.

We tend to synthesize what is said around us and in this society, what is said is often not grammatically correct. A lack of discipline for such grammar sets up a world with no consequences. Spelling can be taken care of by an electronic spellchecker. Yet, we run into a problem when the wrong word was typed, since it is correctly spelled but may not convey anywhere close to what we want it to say.

Writing is not hard; some effort just has to be put into it. Electronic devices and messaging do not turn us into bad English students, just lazy ones. Over the course of our lives, our brain has stored lessons on syntax, grammatical structure, and spelling. Teachers should not be lenient on grammar, but we should not perform to less of our potential.

I suppose we cannot blame technology for poor writing despite all the texts, tweets, chats, and statuses we massacre with abbreviated grammar and misspelled words. However, we have the power and ability to write in complete sentences, bother with punctuation, and remember how to spell, so it is best that we use that ability. Because as Uncle Ben says in Spiderman, “With great power comes great responsibility.” So write and be right.