With the crowning of the word “unfriend“ as the New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year, it got us at Nine Point Ten thinking about the negative effects of email, text messaging, and all things technological on writing skills.

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

Twitter is the prime example of the dangers looming over communication; 140 characters is hardly enough to form a complete sentence, let alone describing what you’re up to, how you feel, and what’s on your mind.

The new generation of computer users have been online their entire lives, and using the digit 2 instead of the word, not only hurts their spelling ability, but it also creates huge problems with homophones.  And who can blame them? Without practicing to, too and two, how else would a person learn their different meanings and how to properly use them in a sentence? Especially when using the number 2, is shorter and perceived as being “cooler”.

There wouldn’t be a problem if this language wasn’t spilling into these users’ formal writing skills; however, more and more, we see these abbreviated words are creeping up.  We understand that the New Oxford American Dictionary is simply trying to shift its public perception from being old, to something that would appeal to younger generation, but they need to also consider the dangers of incorporating a new, online lingo, in their dictionary.

- by Becky Caissie