Here's probably the most depressing story I ran across the past few days, so I had to break blog silence.

We are all waging our private wars against bad grammar, and worse, bad spelling. This has been a subject of mine for a while now.

SMS, while amazingly useful, has sadly made our English worse. The truncated messages have made us talk in abbreviations, of sorts, creating a whole new dictionary of cryptic, vowel-free terms. We all know this, as do 40 million other Filipinos who use cellphones for SMS. This vocabulary has entered the realms of business and the academe, where these slang abbreviations encroach on good taste, and ensure a bad impression.

So, the De La Salle University, supported by CHED no less, has endorsed a cure. The article starts out with promise:

Imagine yourself as a teacher for a moment, correcting tons of test papers, filled with coherent and rational essays. Then suddenly, there’s that one paper, that singular submission that reads more like a secret code with a collection of consonants, an essay practically devoid of vowels: “Shkspr s d mst rcgnzbl hstrc fgr. . . .”

The answer is being pro-active in the re-education...

“We want to take an active part in reeducating students in sending error-free messages by spelling each word correctly,” says James Young, senior marketing manager of software communications company Tegic Communications Southeast Asia. He headed a daylong festivity at the De La Salle University in Manila where the company launched its advocacy campaign on spelling proficiency. Appropriately dubbed, “Text Right . . . T9 It!” the project is supported by the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), in cooperation with TAPAT (Alyansang Tapat Sa Lasallista), which is one of the largest recognized leadership organizations in DLSU solely dedicated to student rights and welfare.

The last phrase, "student rights and welfare", was added in there for effect.

What is T9?

Young explained, “T9 Text Input is predictive software that helps mobile phone and PDA users to quickly write SMS text messages. It offers smart and simple mobile-text solution for users with its new features, which include smart word completion, next word prediction and enhanced multilingual support capabilities.”

If you’re typing “Hello” and you’ve only begun with “He” when the actual word appears on your phone’s screen, then that means your T9 software is already activated. You won’t need to type the rest of the word because the smart software recognizes and predicts the word you need to type. Consequently, this will save you time when you’re texting on the fly.

So, this means that *even* if I spell wrong, it'll make it right everytime! Great! So, hw d hck ds tht mke m a btr spllr?

Read here.

Tags: SMS, Philippines, English, De+La+Salle+University, CHED, DLSU