DW1a

Spending my childhood in Midland, Michigan certainly had an interesting effect on my way of speaking. Growing up in a place that is not that particularly diverse in culture has made the way I talk through all aspects of my life. From an early age I was encouraged to speak in what I have come to understand as Standard English. However, I would be interested in getting the opinion of an outsider who could listen in on the way I talk and see if my way of speaking really matches up to Standard English. I had an older brother, but the nine year age difference between us kept there from being any real influence on the way that I speak. My mother was an elementary school teacher, so the way that I talked at home seemed to be almost identical to the way that I talked at school. The only real source of slang or alternative speech that I was exposed to came from the TV and the radio. My friends and I enjoyed quoting lines from movies that we went to see and speaking in different accents as a joke, but I can’t pick out anything in particular that we really adapted into our everyday conversations. For the most part I went through all my years of school with the same people, so there wasn’t much of a change in the way we talked in 1st grade to the way we talked as seniors in high school. I realize that my opinion on the way I speak is biased, but without having ever been critiqued I don’t really have a good frame of reference.
While I feel that my actual speaking language is very close to Standard English, I can see how my language changes slightly when using new technologies to express my way of speaking. Tools such as face book, aim, and skype have introduced what I would refer to as a lazier way to express oneself. When I first started using these programs I remember using complete sentences as well as some punctuation and grammar. Now when I look at other people’s writings on these sites, I can clearly pick out the beginners who do the exact same thing. My personal favorite is to read face book posts and chats of parents who have created accounts. The amount of information on their profiles is much less than that of my younger friends, but yet it takes up twice as much space because of all the complete sentences. Text messaging is another example of how lazy our way of communicating has become. A text message actually has a limit on the number of letters and symbols that can be sent in one message. Most people would probably consider me to be a relatively poor text message composer, since I have yet to learn how to create shapes and faces in my messages. Often when I receive messages from my friends I feel like I am trying to decipher some sort of code.