By Andrew Vaché

As a nephew in a very close-knit family I know how important it is for my aunts (and uncles, of course) to keep in touch with me while I’m away at school. Gone are the days of the scheduled phone call. Sending a few texts every other day is how they’ve managed to keep tabs on my grades and social life.

Luckily for my family, I am a stickler when it comes to proper usage of the English language so they never have to worry about deciphering different acronyms or chopped up spelling in their texts from me. Not everyone is that lucky though.

Here are some basics that you might see in a typical text from a teen or tween. The most common abbreviations that kids use include LOL (for laughing out loud), OMG (for oh my gosh, goodness etc), TTYL (for talk to you later), IDK (for I don’t know) and BTW (for by the way).

Let’s say you’ve got one of those nieces or nephews who gets super creative with their texts. You know what I mean, using numbers and punctuation in place of letters. I understand how difficult that typing style is to read (and personally I don’t understand why kids take the time to type like that). Here are some tips to remember: numbers used as letters is fairly simple to keep straight; the number 1 can be used as "I"s or "L"s, 3 as an "E", 4 as an "A", 7 as a "T", and 0 as the letter "O" (which is kind of obvious).

Punctuation marks are also quite easy to keep straight: exclamation points for Is or Ls, dollar signs for Ss, hash marks for Hs. Also, your teen nieces/nephews might use different types of punctuation for emphasis such as asterisks.

Remember to type your age. I know it might be appealing to want to type a text message to your nieces and nephews in a language they can understand but eventually they will grow out of that bad type-style habit. You shouldn’t grow into it.

For more information on deciphering text messages or brushing up on abbreviations, webopedia.com has an amazing abbreviations chart that you can see here.

Happy texting!

Andrew Vaché is a 20 year old English/Secondary Education major at Northern Arizona University.