Brevity means to make something brief.
Many features are used in text communication and most of them if not all make texting short and brief.
Ellipsis is a feature used to keep texting brief. Ellipsis is when you omit or exclude a letter or word in a sentence. This is an example; ‘wat up to’.
This sentence contains other features as well. ‘wat’ should be ‘what’ h is omit ‘wat’ takes less time typing then ‘what’. In addition the sentence is miss ‘you are’. ‘you’ and ‘are’ are omit as it takes time and you still understand what the sender would like to say. This how the sentence should be ‘what are you up to’.
Another feature used in the text message sent Upper and Lower case(S). At the start ‘wat’ is not started with a capital, as at the start of any sentence you have to start it with a capital letter.
Not adding a capital let consumes less time, imagine how much time you would spend just to start every sentence with a capital letter, pressing shift every single time.
Vague language keeps text communications brief as instead of mention every single object or issue you can say all about as one thing. e.g ‘are you bring your phone, football, money and books’ instead you can say ‘are you bring your stuff/things’. It also puts all of the items/objects as one or as a whole entity. Texting is made for brief communication so the features will increase the briefness of texting.
Omission is one of the most used espically ampng young people. People use omission absent mindedly or just to send a text.
January 30, 2013 at 9:57 pm
This is a good start – essentially a catalogue of a variety of features of text language for brevity that you could find in the short example in class.
Next you need to talk about the features of spoken language that are transferred to the text domain through clever devices like capitalisation, use of punctuation and emoticons.
I look forward to seeing your work as it develops and reading your answer to the four focussing questions.
Mr Waugh
February 4, 2013 at 10:47 pm
This is good – another reason omission can be used between friends is because they know each other well enough for the things that are left out to be assumed. Your example is a good one – you can say ‘things’ to someone where it can be assumed what you’re referring to. If your relationship is less close, the person might not know what you’re referring to.
The last layer you need to complete is the one where you do what I’ve just done above, and that’s look at the reasons other than simply for brevity that people use these devices in texting.
This is a big improvement on the original.
CW