: Anyway, my point is that it seems to be the opposite today. Modern kids
: (including people close to my age, in college) communicate primarily
: through IM and, even worse, cellphone text messaging, developing the use
: of all the little IM shorthands (particularly because there's no full
: keyboard on phones), so that their communicative writing sounds as bad as
: their speech (lik omg ykno?? lik totly), and then their professional
: writing in papers starts to sound like their communicative writing. And
: some of them think that just running your paper through Word's spellcheck
: will fix it, but any abbreviations with numbers get completely skipped, as
: so any one-letter abbreviations, and the remaining (small) percent that
: actually get corrected don't neccesarily get corrected to the right words!
Oh, and I skipped an important part here: it seems that with a lot of people, requesting that they take the time to write properly is actually *offensive*, and considered rude by other people around (even those who do write well). I've seen many group conversations where one person has just *horrible* writing that takes three or four readings to understand properly, and someone else will ask them politely to please rewrite more clearly because they can't understand. (I usually just don't bother to read it if it's that bad, unless it's really important). Then everyone else in the conversation will jump on that one person for daring to criticize their writing skills! "What are you some kind of grammar Nazi?" And the original writer's excuse is usually, "i cnt b bothrd 2 tak tehtim 2 writ evrythng so gud". Fine, then I can't be bothered to take the time to try to read through a giant, unpunctuated, single-paragraph diatribe of that kind of garbage. Don't waste my time just because you're lazy.
(DISCLAIMER: This whole rant isn't against you, Blake. You write well enough for me, better than most people on the internet. This thread just got me thinking and I really needed to vent).
