y 1 donut lyk ch4tspk n bad grammer

I mentioned a few posts ago that I really despise chatspeak, but I want now to go into a bit more detail about why.

Here's the thing: web forums, bulletin boards, blog posts, and blog comments are all written media, and therefore to get your point across in them, you have to at least put together basic sentences and paragraphs. So why do so many people not seem to believe this?


Chatspeak... I don't even like it in chat, to be honest, but at least if it's confined there, I sort of understand the point. If you're trying to keep up with a realtime conversation or you really do have a limited number of characters you can put per message, abbreviations make sense. But that only works for a sentence or two; anything beyond that is too much and delves into "skip this mess" territory for me.

Needless to say, this means I skip a lot of posts in certain busy forums (*cough*World of Warcraft*cough*).

People often ask why it's such a problem that they're posting in chatspeak... and it's hard to answer that in a way that really gets the point across. One could point out it's harder to read, but that's countered with "but you know what I mean" (although, truthfully, I don't always). And in some people's opinions (yes, mine included), it's sloppy, which is usually countered with calling the person who claims that an elitist snob. But really, that's what it boils down to: it's far harder to parse and fully understand a paragraph laden with chatspeak and it does come across to many people as lazy because it is a shortcut. And there's a time and a place for shortcuts, but longer text communication is really not it.

But it's not just chatspeak that's the problem. Sometimes it's also just sheer bad grammar and spelling (often mixed with chatspeak, to boot). Now, I'm not expecting everyone to write completely perfect posts; people make mistakes, sometimes habitual ones, and that's fine. But when what you basically have is one long run-on paragraph after another (or worse, several paragraphs worth of stuff in one big one), with a significant number of poorly-spelled words (sometimes so bad that you can't figure out what they were supposed to be) and then mix in some completely bizarro grammar, it becomes pretty hard to really understand what the poster is trying to say.

Which is exactly the reason it's a problem.

Whether it's a discussion or debate or just a quick opinion, the only useful approach is to try to make it as clear as possible. That means wording, yes, but it also means using reasonably correct grammar, spelling, and (please!) punctuation, so that people don't have to struggle to find your meaning. If you look at your post later and realize even you're not sure what you were trying to say, you can be doubly sure that's true of your readers. And even if you do think what you're saying is clear, it can only be clearer for putting some effort into the writing.

(It's also worth pointing out that the Internet is, well, international, and non-native speakers of English (or your posting language of choice) are likely to have a harder time understanding chatspeak, parsing misspelled words, or figuring out the right way to read poor grammar.)

In short (too late!), if you truly want to have people read what you say, make it readable!