2 txt or not 2 txt

A confession: When my daughter was living with us a few months ago, she and I would text each other….while we were both in the house. I would be upstairs, and she would be downstairs, and we would text about important topics such as whether the clothes dryer had stopped, or what was on the menu for dinner.
So I understand the convenience of texting, and even appreciate its economy of words. But I’ve had to put aside my attention to the rules of English – “wat r u doing?” “going 2 a movie.” And I’m worried that it could mark the end of conversation as we know it.
My daughter, who’s 21, sends and receives about 4,000 texts every month. She says she would rather text than talk, even with her best friends. “We just don’t like to talk on the phone,” she says, her fingers flying over the tiny keyboard on her phone.
She recently graduated from college, and as she labored over two dozen hand-written thank-you notes for graduation gifts she received, she said she wished her QWERTY keyboard could have done the job for her.
But letter-writing was an art, I told her. Texting isn’t. It gets the job done, but I would guess there’s not a lot of poetry or even memorable prose in the millions or billions of texts sent every day.
Still, there's even some good news about texting. A recent study in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology found that texting can have a positive effect on a child's reading development.
Last week, an Iowa teen-ager won $50,000 in a national texting contest sponsored by LG. Her proud mom said she texts about 500 times a day, which is about once every three minutes in 24 hours, not taking any time out for sleeping, eating, and maybe even studying.
After completing a series of texting obstacle courses, the two finalists had to text this 140-character message error-free: “Zippity Dooo Dahh Zippity Ayy...MY oh MY, what a wonderful day! Plenty of sunshine Comin' my way....Zippitty Do Dah Zippity Aay! WondeRful Feeling Wonderful day!”
OK, maybe it wasn’t Walt Whitman (way too many characters in that guy’s work) but at least it rhymed.