Kayla Blanfort

September 21, 2016

Professor Kashtan
UWRT 1101
A Literacy Narrative

Every child from the early 2000s remembers their first cell phone. Receiving a cell phone
was like receiving a gift from God himself. Anybody who didnt have a cell phone thought you
were a king or queen or something and they bowed down to the righteousness of the phone. This
was the first step into adulthood for us kids. After that the next step was figuring out how to use
the phone. But the number one problem was learning how to assimilate into the text messaging
slang, which for a child was like learning a whole different language.
In 4th grade, I noticed a lot of my peers began to receive cell phones for their birthdays
and Christmas. I wanted to be like my peers so I begged my mother for one too. Unfortunately,
she said no and I spent that whole year a phoneless loser. 5th grade rolled around and by this time
I was plotting. I figured since my mother would not provide me with a cell phone, it was time to
move on to plan B: convince dad to get me a phone. I guess I must have been pretty persuasive
because not even a week later, I had a package under my name from T-Mobile. Oh what a good
day that was.
I let everyone in my class know that I had a phone and that I was moving up into the big
leagues with them. I was not, however, prepared for such things as texting. The first time I had
texted someone was my mom and this was because I was testing the waters with this new device.
The conversation went like this: Hey mommy! I am texting you! Hey Kay, how do you like

your phone? I think it is awesome! What are you doing? Kay. Im downstairs. It was a
pretty normal conversation. I figured this is how texting was supposed to be. The same as regular
English grammar that we learned in school.
So texting should have been the same or close to it right? Wrong! Once I started texting
my friends, I noticed that it was very different from texting my mom. I was forced to learn a new
language similar to English, and I was not prepared for this. I had no guidebooks to tell me what
my friends were saying. Things like wut r u doin? and OMG dat is cool had me very
confused.
Since there were no guidebooks, at least not at the time, I had to learn the language the
old fashion way. Just like trying to learn Spanish, I had to ask my friends what things meant and
then because I was also a curious child, I made them explain to me how this method of writing
was useful and why it was hard for them to just type it all out. Essentially that is what the text
message language was: an abbreviated way of saying what you need to say. I think personally at
the time I was not really into to this method of communication but then slowly I began to
assimilate into the abbreviated sentence lifestyle. I will say that it was a convenient type of
writing especially because clicking small buttons on the phone became really aggravating seeing
that my thumbs were a little big for the buttons so I would hit a letter by mistake and then have
to backspace it.
I gave up my guard of writing properly and joined the easy texting lifestyle. A
conversation that my best friend and I had in 7th grade went like this: Me: Dnt yu hate it wen yu
know a person but havent seen them in a long time n den yu be like do you remember me n they
say no then yu feel stupid lol, Princess: omg ikr lol but yu make tht person feel weird. Another

conversation that I had with a friend was like this: Destiny: wyd. Me: Nun wbu. Destiny: bout to
paint my nailz. Me: Cools wanna get on 3 way wit jessica. Destiny: nahh i cnt talk witt my gma
ritt nw. I guess I had eventually got the hang of this language.
Around 6th grade everyone had cell phones and everyone was fluent in the texting
language. It became like a culture amongst the age groups of 10- the early 20s, at least that is
what I would say. The coolest thing about this language was that most of us, if not all of us kids
were able to bounce back to proper English when we were talking to an adult or writing
something in class. I can say, however, back then I had times when I was writing something and
I would slip up and say lol in a paper and obviously that was wrong for two reasons: one being
that its not proper English and two that is an informal phrase and most papers were to be written
formally.
The whole point of this story was to show that learning the text messaging language in
some sense broadened my communication skills, because I was able to communicate in more
ways than the conventional proper English. My literacy skills also improved because it helped
shape my social skills. In some way I was able to communicate effectively amongst my peers. At
times when I was not texting, I would be on Facebook talking to friends on messenger. It was
like an online phone, so when I would message on there I would still be able to use the language.
The text message language was useful in other forms of communication other than using the
phone. I think learning the language of texting really helped my literacy skills today. However, I
do not text like I did when I was in middle school, I have transitioned back into typing it all out
because at a certain point in time, writing like that looks unprofessional and just not good at all.