Adam Wenger’s criticism of text messaging (“Vibration Celebration Inappropriate,” Daily Nexus, Oct. 16, 2006) that people lose conversational skills by relying on text instead of talking to communicate is misplaced. Rather, the problem is text users losing touch with writing at an elementary level. Your self-example of forgetting to capitalize the first word of each sentence demonstrated that enough. Constantly using abbreviations like “thru” and “idk” does little to affect our conversational skills because our cell phones are not the only agent of conversation, if that detail slipped past you. But we are more reluctant to write letters and e-mails, and when we do, we tend not to employ proper English in them anyway and instead write in the manner that we speak. But this whole premise sounded nothing more than a way to excuse your annoyance with people using their cell phones for other than their primary function, which is talking. If that’s the case, get used to cell phone technology. It’s not meant to make things easier, it’s to make things look cooler, feel better and a whole lot more fun. Who wants to talk when you can guiltlessly misspell words (they call it “creative spelling”), not capitalize proper nouns, forget periods, take pictures and videos, play mp3 files and so on?

JERRY KIM