Last Updated on March 21, 2024 by Saira Farman
Through E-communication you can talk informally and formally depending on the situation. You can send an email to your workplace may that be your senior or boss. The same goes for emailing professors which are considered formal e-communication. For more direct and informal communication with those who are close to your such as friends, family, and work colleague a person use texts.
Youth texting and literacy have been studied in multiple contexts (Zebroff and D., 2018). One of these contexts is the impact informal e-communication has it has on formal writing. In this post, you will learn more regarding this context.
Table of Contents
Impact E-Communication Has on Formal Writing
Negative Impacts:
Spelling Mistakes:
While you are typing you tend to make a lot of errors but nobody seems to call it out. You end up writing “knw” instead of “know”, “incomfortable” instead of “uncomfortable” but everyone gets your point and nobody wants to correct you. There are still some people who will correct you and in an informal setting this will come off as annoying or “not chill enough”. If you get too prone to texting there is a chance of it affecting your academic writing skills.
Sentence Structure:
Another negative impact of informal e-communication on formal writing is the disturbance in sentence structures. When chatting with somebody you are not careful if the sentence is in the active voice or passive voice. The only motive of the message is to get your point across and the sentence being active or passive does not cause any problems.
There is no readability score that you are bound by and therefore you have the freedom to structure the sentence however you want.
Moreover, you can also misuse tenses and still will not be called. It will be rather considered trendy. For example, typing “you aint nobody” instead of typing “you are nobody”. Now if you get used to mixing up tenses and active as well as passive sentences this will also be witnessed in your formal writing. Messing up sentence structure in formal writing, where readability is very important will get you to allow a low grade.
Improper Punctuations:
It is a well-known factor that most people do not use punctuation while chatting. You may see a bunch of question marks here and there and some full stops but that is pretty much it. There is little to no use of commas or semi-colons while chatting except for emoticons. This is why some students are unaware of its proper use.
This is quite concerning considering that even if they proofread their formal pieces of writing they still are incapable of finding their punctuation errors. Proofreading is a step of revision (helpwithdissertation, 2021). After completing the proofreading task you have to submit your writing but if a student has no idea how it is done then they will fail. You search up “hire someone to do my assignment proofreading” and take somebody’s help to potentially eliminate proofreading errors.
Unnecessary Abbreviations:
While abbreviations are used in formal writing they are unusually used for names of laws, organization, and much more but are never used for expressing actions or emotions. Abbreviations like “smh” for “shaking my head”, “lol” for “lots of laughter” have no place in formal writing but since you use it in texting you can not help but use it in formal writing pieces as well.
While using such abbreviations in informal e-communication is not a big deal. In fact, people will encourage you to use it as well but when it comes to formal writing, using these abbreviations is condemned upon.
Informal Tone:
This should come as no surprise given the name. Nobody uses an informal tone while writing formal writing such as an application or dissertation. If you get habituated to overusing informal tone excessively in informal e-communication – in form of inappropriate words you may end up writing it in your assignments.
Chances are that you may not even recognize it because you have become so desensitized towards these words. This eventually puts a bad impression of your assignment on the reader
Reliance on Autocorrect:
Smartphones introduced the option of auto-correcting soon after they rose in popularity and everybody was hooked. Students started relying on it whenever they made a spelling mistake. They do not need to correct them the auto-correct option will do it for them. Because of this students never bothered to learn the right spellings and this was reflected in their formal pieces of writing. Where there is an abundance of spelling mistakes that were never corrected.
Ø Solutions
- Inspiring young students to read magazines, books, and websites that they find interesting
- Tell them about the role of technology in everybody’s life and where they should draw the line.
- Getting them interested in using traditional writing formats, such as journaling.
- Suggesting college students get help from their supervisors or academic assistance services like “Write My Dissertation for Me UK based services” if needed.
Positive Impacts:
Getting Help:
Informal e-communication is a great way of getting help in a more comprehensible way. If you ever need help understanding any complex topic or even formal writing itself you can always ask your friend. Through the use of chatting, they are capable of explaining your formal writing better than any website or book because the conversing style is informal and less sophisticated.
Developing New Software:
Given how reliant people are on auto-correcting encouraged the creation of grammar checkers such as Grammarly. Now you can check your spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure errors easily. It has made formal writing much easier and saves students a lot of time. This time is often invested in coming up with better and more high-quality formal pieces of writing.
Endnote
Now that you know the main impacts of informal e-communication on formal writing so remember to make good use of this knowledge.
References
- HWD, 2021. Editing vs proofreading. HWD. Available at: https://www.helpwithdissertation.co.uk/blog/editing-vs-proofreading/ [Accessed March 16, 2022].
- Zebroff, D., 2018. Youth texting: Help or hindrance to literacy?. Education and Information Technologies, 23(1), pp.341-356.
Read More: How can you improve the remote working process for your business?
