CAN TEXTING AFFECT YOUR ELA GRADE?!?!

"F in Grammer ? Maybe its your phone's fault" By Alessandra Ponteza this article is about how texting affects your actual writing in the real world, for college papers, job applications and just writing in general. Kids are forgetting their actual punctuation and they're getting lazy and using abbreviations and not actually writing out the words. For example they're writing "u" instead of actually writing out you. Teachers have seen it as a problem and see that cell phones as an enemy and aren't helping the kids and that the auto corrections are pretty much doing all the work, and kids aren't even proof reading their stories or papers. The author wanted us to see that we should stop using phones so much, and make an effort on improving our grammer instead of taking the easy way out, like teens usually do. Its going to get them farther in life.

For example in the article its talks about that young kids are offered jobs and they sometimes have to write a paper, well in this case "More than 2,000 applications were submitted by young people during the summer and they had mountains of misspelled words and missing punctuation, spacing mistakes and abbreviations" said the article this shows that kids don't really care, and write as if they're texting a friend and aren't actually formally writing like they should be. they don't really care enough to read it over and make sure these things don't happen, because when you write a paper like that the person that's going to hire you for the job isn't really going to care enough to read it, since you don't care enough to proof read it. In the article they also include statics from 2005 "64% of kids used informational writing styles typical of electronic communication, 50% used informal capitalization , 38% used abbreviations like "LOL", and 25% used emoticons. These were the statistics in 2005 maybe they've changed because the phones are more advanced.

In my opinion I feel like this is true because this happens to me at times where I write like I'm texting, which can effect my ELA grades at time. In my opinion they should make the kids more aware of this because us teenagers are lazy and careless I guess you can say, and we don't always proof read our things, just to get them over with and take care of it. They should also teach the kids what's the difference from texting and writing an actual essay and that you can't use the same type of writing  it can be good for when your taking notes and it's faster but for actual writing its unacceptable.      

Think before doing

I’m reading the book “Tears of a Tiger” by Sharon D. Draper , this book is about these 4 boys and they are best friends, 2 of them are in the basketball team( Robbie and Andy) and the other two are just a part of the group ( B.J and Tyrone . One night after a game the 4 friends decided to go out and drink. The night takes a turn when they get into an accident because they were drinking and driving. Robbie dies because of the accident. Robbie was a kid with a lot of potential and one day hoped to be a basketball player, but didn't get to meet his potential because he ended up dying. This left Andy his closest friend feeling guilty. Andy feels as if he should’ve been the one to die instead of Robbie because he was such a bright kid, which so much going for him. He also feels guilty because he was the one driving in the first place and didn't save Robbie, while he was burning in the car.

For example Andy says to his coach “I wanted to die right after the accident. I wanted it to be me that dead instead of Rob. He had so much goin’ for himself. He woulda got that scholarship too, coach. This shows that Andy does recognize that his friend really had something going for him, and Andy feels as if he’s to blame for Robbie’s death, because a kid that might have made it to pro basketball died over Andy’s carelessness. Another example when he’s also talking to the coach about his trial he says “I think I would have felt better if I woulda had to suffer and complain a little” then the coach says “You are suffering, Andy. The judge knows that. We all do”. I feel like Andy is a little too hard on himself because it wasn't really his fault all things happen for a reason whether its good or bad, they’re going to happen whether  you like it or not, it’s just the way life works. Like the coach also told Andy if Robbie was a live and Andy was dead, Robbie would've felt just as guilty so nobody really ever wins at the end of the day.

I think that under aged kids shouldn't be drinking in the first place, because the consequences aren't going to be so fun, and you only drink for one night, but the consequence might scar you forever. So it’s not really worth it. Yeah it might be fun, but if you are drinking you shouldn't drive whether your 16 or 60. The risk of you getting into an accident is always going to be the same. In the book the put a statistic and it says that every 18 minutes somewhere in the world someone gets into an accident because of drunk driving, and if you think about it that A LOT of people, now maybe these statistics have changed but who knows. In my opinion one night of fun isn't really worth someone close to you dying. You should think about consequences before you take part in an action such as this one.