THE JU: we get it

This is the 4th English class in a row in which my first reading assignment was an article about how the texting epidemic that hits teenagers and young adults so hard is eating away at our ability to write intelligently.
All I have to say is enough already.
It gets beaten into our heads everyday that the way we write in e-mails, text messages and our facebook profiles is inappropriate in the classroom. We Get It. And honestly not one of my friends has ever tried to pass that off as academic writing.
Just like a good student would never turn in a paper that was written in the language that they used to speak to their friends, a good student would never turn in a paper in text speak. So I guaruntee that if a student hands in an essay strewn with abreviations and usless acronyms, that student would have turned in a shitty paper even if texting and blogs never exsisted.

And we also don't need to be taught how to conciously switch from text speak to the standard english used in academic writing. If you try to hold someone's hand through something like that you just hinder personal repsonsibility. It's like manners.
If raised correctly, the transition between the way a child speaks to his friend and the way he speaks to his grandmother should be a natural transition.
If taught correctly, a student should be able to transition just as easily from the informal communication we use electronically and the formal rules of academic writing.

Just teach kids all the rules and tell them that standard english is the only appropriate way to write for an academic audience. If they fuck up after that it's because they're lazy, not because texting is slowing eating away at the pillars of good english.