Along with myself, many of my peers are becoming avid readers and writers- of text messages. Thanks to text messaging, I am able to catch up with a friend in Louisiana, ask my mom a multitude of questions, send my best friend a selfie and receive replies in less than a minute. Texting is a worldwide phenomenon that I love, love to hate and hate that I love. Clearly, we have a very dysfunctional relationship. The cold, hard truth is that the power of texting comes with more cons than pros but no one will look up from their phone long enough to see them.

Unless you are in some remote location with relatively no cellphone reception (or the school between the hours of 7:25 a.m. and 2:25 p.m.), there is a similar scene: groups of zombie-like people with averted eyes, typing viciously away on cell phones and smartphones. Texting has made it easier and ultimately, more acceptable for humans to become less and less personal. This trend has infected every aspect of life. Now that phones are nestled comfortably in the palms of the majority of people, phone calls are few and far between. I have to play a game of “nose goes” with my friends to determine who has to call for a pizza delivery because actually talking to another human has grown into an awkward and uncomfortable experience.

Beyond that, face-to-face conversations (the ones that are not successfully dodged by saying “I’ll text you” or simply avoiding eye contact) are commonly wrecked with “text talk.” Texting has developed its own grammar and conventions out of texter laziness to stretch their thumbs less than a centimeter to form a complete word. These acronyms are for texting, don’t bring them to the table in a normal conversation with me. I am a firm believer in the fact that there is a time and place for everything; acronyms are strictly for texting and memorization purposes.

Your elementary school teachers did not suffer through all those years rigorously teaching you how to form words to create sentences that stream together to make paragraphs all for texting to swoop in and wreck it one emoticon at a time. Sadly, this is the reality of the situation. In the persistent march of the texters, mangled sentences are commonly robbed of punctuation, correct spelling and word usage. The English language has officially hoisted a crisp white flag to texting.

By no means am I throwing stones in a glass house, I will confess that I send over 7,000 text messages a month. I also enjoy talking on the phone, reading and writing. These are quaint old habits I picked up before my phone became an extension of my body. That said, I ask the zombies of my generation who have fallen victim to this movement to put down the phone and get some fresh air. Read a book. Get a cat. It will be good for you, I promise.