Texting lowercase may seem cool or trendy, but it is symptomatic of our lazy culture which glorifies smart people bowing down to stupidity.

Teenagers and young adults often don’t use proper grammar when texting, but now it is bleeding over into emails, essays and even handwritten assignments. Typing has made us worse, not only with using grammatical norms but also with knowing them.

Though many messaging apps correct grammar and capitalization mistakes, people think it is better to send a message with incorrect spelling or grammar. Imagine if the same logic was applied to tests. Nobody would share their test scores with their friends except the people who fail on purpose. There would no longer be that smart, annoying kid who always asks you what score you got, and there would be no incentive to try to do well to get into a college or just get a better score than your best friend.  

Even those kids who let autocorrect correct their mistakes, though better than those who flaunt their stupidity, are still not learning as much as we used to when we used pen and paper. Cursive seems like a thing of the past, even though it is more efficient, looks nicer and helps with memorization.

Even though Gen Z claims that they can text informally and then write essays and emails formally, I have received countless emails with the starts of sentences not capitalized, and without a proper greeting or ending. I have heard people say “me” before the name of someone they did something with when talking to a teacher. The norms for texting and more formal writing bleed together, and soon the grammatical norms that we learned in school will be obsolete.

Part of the reason that the younger generations act this way is not because they are dumber than previous generations, but because they value convenience over accuracy. In other words, they are simply lazy. They feel the need to shorten words like charisma to “rizz” and you to “u.” And though we all think that it is cliché to hear someone complaining about their grandson who is too lazy to get a job, I am worried that we will get to a place where this is a real concern.

Another reason for typing shorthand is that people are scared to show their intelligence. I see people ashamed to admit they read for pleasure or people making fun of their friends for using big words. Eventually, those people will stop reading and using big words. When that happens, we will bow down to stupidity.