“Let me put it to you this way… ‘wat u up 2 tday? mondayz r the wurst.’”

dus it bthr u whn ppl rite lik dis on the net? its lik there speakin a diffrnt languig tht mkes no sens unls u tak time 2 luk @ it.

Sure, that might have been leaning a bit towards the extreme end of the spectrum, but this is the sort of thing that is surely a common sight to all who use the Internet. Now I don’t know about any of you out there, but being the “grammar Nazi” that I am this sort of thing just bugs me. And I’m sure that I’m not the only one.

 

I mean I can understand when some people make mistakes, since spell checks aren’t available everywhere, nor are they terribly reliable in certain circumstances. Everyone makes mistakes after all. Not to mention, the Internet is admittedly not the same as an English classroom, or even a writing center, where spelling and grammar should be kept at a high level.

Even so, I honestly wonder why people must insist on typing with shorthand methods like that. Sure, it can save time for whoever is typing the message by shortening a few words. Even then, this doesn't apply to those people who, for some reason, feel that replacing "was" with "wuz" makes everything better. In addition and unfortunately, I don’t think those who are on the receiving end of such messages can really say that they've saved anything.

In my opinion, the shorthand writing of the Internet is simply a mess to sort through. For all of the time saved by the sender of the message, the reader would have to spend an equal or greater amount of time wading through the disjointed letters to piece together the meaning on their own, or at worst even misunderstanding and horribly skewing the intended message. Even those virtuosos in the mystical art of removing letters from words have to spend some time looking at the message in order to know what the sender was trying to tell them. These few seconds must, of course, once again be made up to relieve our busy schedules, and so the cycle of shorthand continues in one everlasting eyesore.

With the amount of exposure to the Internet and other shortened speech forms, such as the similar concept of “txt tlk” for texting with cell phones, kids are getting the impression that these sort of casual abbreviations are acceptable.

They’re not.

...Okay, okay, so maybe they’re not so bad when you’re talking with friends. But even so, excessive use of it in every part of a person’s life can have some pretty damaging effects on their English skills regardless. If you want proof, look no further than our nation’s “cherished” SAT, where scores for both reading and writing have been, and still are, on a steady decline. (Of course, for what it’s worth, math scores are getting better, so I hope you can read those charts!)

I’d honestly hoped that students would at least be required to type or write their essays and other English homework properly, and would thus be able to get practice with typing more than a staggering nine words in actual English, preventing this "streamlining" of language. Well, curses, foiled again. Regrettably, looking into the matter only confirms the issue that students are perfectly fine with using “u” as an appropriate substitution for “you” in their analyses of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

In the end, sure, maybe u can get ur point across with one or two letters when you're chatting with your friends. Have fun explaining to your boss what your memo says in a few years.

All in all, I guess that's about it with this little rant of mine. If you want to talk with me, feel free to send me a message! (No shorthand, plz please.)