After reading “We Learned to Write the Way We Talk” by Gretchen McCulloch, I realized how much my writing has changed over the past couple of years. Ever since I got an email in 2009, I always wanted to use emojis and shortened words in my messages. I would always see my older siblings texting their friends and I wanted to be like them. I used to email my family members and my cousins and include as many emojis as possible. This was the beginning of conveying my emotions into text. As I got older and began texting more and more, I became accustomed to using certain emojis or discourse conventions to express how I was feeling. When reflecting on my evolution as a writer, I think this may have played a part in improving my formal writing. While texting is widely considered to be informal writing, the familiarity I developed with texting helped me better convey my emotions in formal writing. For example, when writing my literacy narrative last semester, I did not have a hard time incorporating multimodal elements into my writing and I enjoyed explaining my past experiences in writing. When I was younger, I always disliked writing and considered it to be extremely difficult. The more I wrote (informally or formally), the more comfortable I began to enjoy writing.

I decided to pick a picture poking fun at the use of certain phrases in texting because I felt it directly related to the discussion we were having in class. Even though “lol” and the laughing emoji are both used when something is funny, we usually have the same, “straight-face” reactions when using them.