lolwut
As e-mail messages, text messages and social network postings become
nearly ubiquitous in the lives of teenagers, the informality of
electronic communications is seeping into their schoolwork, a new study says.
--Informal Style of Electronic Messages Is Showing Up In Schoolwork, Study Finds
I think my first encounter with misplaced chatspeak was back in eighth grade, when I had to peer edit an English assignment. I was paired up with a friend of mine. She wasn't the greatest writer in the world, but she was a nice girl.
I was going through her paper, checking off errors and correcting her spelling. Then I saw it. I blinked to make sure I hadn't misread. I hadn't! There it was, plain as day, staring me right in the face! It was an atrocity! It was an insult! It was a LOL.
Okay, so I'm being overdramatic. But at thirteen, I was quite the self-righteous grammar nazi. I'd go onto forums and correct the mistakes of posters twice my age. Someone should have hit me. I'd have deserved it.
"Kathryn," [not her real name] I said, tapping the literary atrocity with my tooth-marked red pen, "do you think Mrs. G is even gonna know what this means?"
(Mrs. G, our English teacher was fifty years old, which translates into approximately three million when you're in eighth grade. I wasn't sure if she even knew what a computer was.)
"Oh, probably not," Kathryn admitted. I crossed out the LOL, smiling to myself as I imagined it writhing in much-deserved anguish.
I'd started using the computer so I could write stories in Microsoft Word, so my grammar and spelling habits were well-formed by the time I encountered the internet. Then I found that just by typing well, people online would assume I was anywhere from sixteen to eighteen years old. Words, I realized, were more powerful than my friends gave them credit for.
I've deflated my head a little bit since that day in English class. Though I still wouldn't be seen dead using anything other than a rushed "brb", I can tolerate it in others. Even still, a little flame of prejudice burns in my heart. I automatically have higher opinions of people who take the time to spell properly, online and on paper, and I hope that my future employers will, too.
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--Informal Style of Electronic Messages Is Showing Up In Schoolwork, Study Finds
I think my first encounter with misplaced chatspeak was back in eighth grade, when I had to peer edit an English assignment. I was paired up with a friend of mine. She wasn't the greatest writer in the world, but she was a nice girl.
I was going through her paper, checking off errors and correcting her spelling. Then I saw it. I blinked to make sure I hadn't misread. I hadn't! There it was, plain as day, staring me right in the face! It was an atrocity! It was an insult! It was a LOL.
Okay, so I'm being overdramatic. But at thirteen, I was quite the self-righteous grammar nazi. I'd go onto forums and correct the mistakes of posters twice my age. Someone should have hit me. I'd have deserved it.
"Kathryn," [not her real name] I said, tapping the literary atrocity with my tooth-marked red pen, "do you think Mrs. G is even gonna know what this means?"
(Mrs. G, our English teacher was fifty years old, which translates into approximately three million when you're in eighth grade. I wasn't sure if she even knew what a computer was.)
"Oh, probably not," Kathryn admitted. I crossed out the LOL, smiling to myself as I imagined it writhing in much-deserved anguish.
I'd started using the computer so I could write stories in Microsoft Word, so my grammar and spelling habits were well-formed by the time I encountered the internet. Then I found that just by typing well, people online would assume I was anywhere from sixteen to eighteen years old. Words, I realized, were more powerful than my friends gave them credit for.
I've deflated my head a little bit since that day in English class. Though I still wouldn't be seen dead using anything other than a rushed "brb", I can tolerate it in others. Even still, a little flame of prejudice burns in my heart. I automatically have higher opinions of people who take the time to spell properly, online and on paper, and I hope that my future employers will, too.
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Christina, I think you've nailed it. The older your audience, the more your abbreviations and txt lingo will brand you (perhaps fairly, perhaps not) as a careless teenager. The younger your audience, the more likely you'll be understood, but in either case, if you want to earn a living with your communications skills (whether that is in writing, teaching, sales, or what have you), then it's to your benefit to spend the extra time to demonstrate that you know the rules of grammar that college-educated people are supposed to know.
I'll repeat that I won't mind at all if people want to use abbreviations in the comments they leave on peer blogs, but it might not be a bad idea to start practicing now.