DW1a

When I was 12 years old I was a very persuadable young boy. I went to a Catholic school until the fifth grade, and I was somewhat of a rebel compared to my other Catholic student peers. My classmates were very up tight and proper, all wearing uniforms and doing everything perfectly; including speaking. I learned to speak well in school, I spoke well in school and at home, but when I was with my neighborhood friends it was a totally different story. I mentioned that I was persuadable young man; and even more so by my older public school neighborhood friends. One day my friend Eric came home from school and came over like always, but instead of called me by my name, he called me “jackass”. Now I didn’t know what the word meant, but I knew that it wasn’t good. He said he had learned it during recess and it was a cool thing to do. So obviously I started doing the same thing. I gradually learned more words from him and from my other older friends, mostly slang and profanity. I never dared speak those words during school because there would have been major consequences, but I didn’t know what the consequences would be at home. A year after learning my new words and new slang I let the phrase “freakin’ radical dude” slip from my tiny lips. The resulting bellow from my mother was enough to let me know that there is a time and a place for my newfound words and the house or my school is definitely not the place for them. This experience has proven to be a very good one because still to this day there are things I say around my friend that I don’t say in school or to my parents. But I still try to speak well in school because good grammar is a good thing to practice because it will always be useful in life.

Nowadays Facebook is the new AOL or AIM, everyone is on it and it’s the new “cool” way to communicate with each other. There is a hefty difference between the wording and grammar you see on Facebook and the grammar you see in academic papers (like this one). I for one have succumbed to Facebook and the “Facebook talk”, as I call it. There is no such thing as correct or any punctuation for that matter, good grammar, or any emphasis on spelling. Now I am not as bad as others, I still spell out my words and try to use basic punctuation, as I think it makes the sentences easier to read. But Facebook is a good way to get out of the academic realm of writing and get into a more laid back way of talking and writing to your peers. The way I write on Facebook is incredibly different from the way I write a paper like this, as it should be for everyone (hopefully).