By Gary L. Flowers | SACOBSERVER.COM WIRE SERVICES

Editor's Note: Headline reads "In My Humble Opinion, Text Is Bad"

(NNPA) - Recently, the National Texting Championships were held in New York City to crown the nation's speediest at sending written messages via a hand-held device, most often via mobile phones. The phenomenon known as texting has become wildly popular by cell-phone-aholics, as a quick and direct way to communicate messages without talking.

Remember when phones were used to talk? Today, mobile phones serve many functions, from personal organizer to pocketsize typewriter. Text messaging has more people communicating about less more often. The ''Generation Text'' can be traced to the late 1990s when mobile phone companies such as One2One (United Kingdom) and Nokia (Japan) began replacing analogue phones with digital ones (essentially, a computer within the phone), and offering ''pre-pay'' phone plans, allowing more people of ordinary means access to the mobile phone industry. The major difference between small computers and mobile phones with texting capability was a keypad rather than a keyboard. The result was keypads on digital phones only allowed 160 characters per message.

Therefore, the emergence of text talk began. For starters, according to research by Sean O. Cadhain, most text messages fall into two major categories: informational/practical and informational/relational. In other words, roughly 63 percent communicate what, when, where etc.; and 31 percent communicate salutary, friendship, romantic, and sexual messages. To convey long thoughts by using only 160 character forces people to abbreviate commonly used words. For example: University - uni; Messages - msgs; Are - r; Good - gd. Text phrases are often more time consuming with less return. The time one spends on texting the phrases what up?, how r u?, where u?, I m there 4 u, could be answered quicker with a short phone call. In their worse use, text messages are leading societal communication away from good grammar (txt msgs r leadn us frm gd gram). Most friends do not grade text messages and rarely raise an eyebrow at misspellings, improper syntax, and the lack of grammatical symbols.

Moreover, parents should be aware that texting allows children to communicate at all hours of the night in secretive silence. When you add the anonymity of faceless messages, the concern level should be heightened. Perhaps parents should lobby Congress for safeguards for text messages similar to channel blocks for television.

At their most effective use, non-verbal text messages can be sent in a professional setting to advise, warn (Virginia Tech University), or encourage or convey in-audible humor. Not that I ever engaged in such, but I do know people who sent jokes in staff meetings only to witness co-workers double over in laughter under the scornful eye of the president. In such cases, text messaging allows professional pranksters stealth-like security from identification. Yet, many companies have become more aware of the distractive devolution of the glow of a mobile phone on the bowed head of an inattentive worker.

Whether useful or wasteful, what really vexes me about text messaging is the literate laziness it engenders. Many who un-grammatically text on a regular basis finds it difficult to correctly communicate when the need arises. I remember playing team sports as a youngster with pride, enthusiasm, and diligence to perform in practice the moves for use in official games. Whether it was shooting hundreds of free-throw shots consecutively, catching fly balls in the backyard, or running pass patterns with my father's direction, I practiced with the precision of game situations.

Why then has society led us to dumb down our communication skills with speedy speak? As I learned of a 14-year-old named William Glass III who participated in the National Texting Championship, I was encouraged that some of us still value correct communication over comfortable ''ca ca.'' Mr. Glass sees no tension between alacrity and accuracy. I applaud William Glass for his example, and encourage ''Generation Text'' not to let the quest for quickness erode excellence.

Gary L. Flowers is executive director and CEO of the Black Leadership Forum, Inc.