Language use study -texting,spoken and online conversations.

Authors Avatar by shakspatel (student)

Online talk is a type of multi- modal talk- it’s a written form that contains elements of spoken language.  Two of the conversations i have created are online and one is spoken. I will be explaining what devices people use to maintain variety when messaging and how this relates to peoples attitudes to messaging and spoken language.

I will be comparing three sets of data:

1) Text message between a Mother and Daughter,

2) Spoken conversation between and Employer (42) and employee (Interview)

3) Online conversation between two friends (Both 14).

Data one shows various punctuation used such as: questions marks (?), commas (,) and exclamation marks (!). Data one doesn’t contain as much punctuation as it should but it proves that adults tend to use more punctuation than teenagers. The mother in data one uses an exclamation mark to show her expression/emotions, the mother also used an exclamation mark to represent the fact that she cannot express her emotions to her daughter as they are not having a face to face conversation but are currently text messaging. The mother uses the exclamation mark to show that she’s excited ‘the weathers been great!’ people could also use exclamation marks to show anger e.g. your so stupid! But whatever is said before the exclamation mark gives it a meaning.

The use of emoticons in data one shows the emoticons of the daughter and show us the sort of tone in voice she may be expressing ‘:)’ gives us the impression that the daughter is in a happy mood for the mum, it may also be her hint to her mother that she was smiling while she was writing it, there are normally s variety of emoticon to use, almost every emoticon to go with the mood people are in at the time.  Its usually the younger age group that choose to use emoticons, adults tend to use punctuation to show how they feel.

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The daughter uses ellipsis (‘ in 20’ she misses out minutes) but even though the daughter missed out ‘minutes’ it didn’t seem to make a difference as the mother still understood it and so do us readers. The daughter uses ellipsis as a way of speeding up the process of typing. Ellipsis is when words are missed out.

The conversation contains use of initialism, which is when phrases have been shortened to the initial letters of the words e.g. ‘ly2’ for ‘love you too’ this shows that the mum is in a rush as she did say in ...

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This is a successful and thoughtful essay comparing the linguistic features of samples of text drawn from social media sources. It suffers a little because we do not have access to the original material but short quotations are used with good effect to illustrate the points made by the writer. Useful comparisons and comments are made on differences between age groups (mother and daughter), status (employer and employee) and sex but sometimes conclusions are jumped to that are unjustified by the narrow base of the sampling. "proves", for example, is too strong a word to use for any indications that can be drawn. Quite frequent faults of sentence construction, phrasing and slipping into the past tense detract from an otherwise excellent piece of work. 3 stars