Redhatter’s Web Blog

Ugh yeah… I’ve got a bee in my bonnet, and I’m having another winge.

I don’t know what the cause is, but for whatever reason, there’s been an increase in the number of people who, instead of properly typing words out, and at least attempting proper spelling and grammar (which I’ll admit, I don’t always get perfect myself), instead, insist on cheap shortcuts. Even on exams, there are people out there who would rather write “2″, “u” and “ur”, instead of spelling those words out properly.
For people who are from a non-English speaking background, yeah fair enough, they won’t know all the intricacies of the English language. But at least they try to get things right. The people I speak of, are those who have only ever known one language, English, have been taught (presumably) literacy skills at school, yet still insist on hard to read, cheap, dodgy shortcuts.
I’ve got a simple motto which I stick by:

If you want a question answered, and not mocked, make sure it can be read.

I don’t know about others… but I do get a lot of email, and I also have a lot of things to do in real life. I’ve got better things to do than to try and decipher a badly written email. Okay, there are some well-known acronyms such as “LOL”, those are fine. But dropping letters for the sake of it (laziness), is not on. On SMS messages, I can tollerate it to a point: you’re working on a telephone keypad, with limited space to write a message. On online games, I’ll tollerate it (to a lesser extent) as one has limited time to construct a message. I won’t, however, tollerate it on email messages, on chatroom protocols such as IRC, or on instant messenger systems, where one is presumably working on a decent-size keyboard and has ample time to write the message.
I mean, how long does it take to type “2″, vs typing “to”, “too” or “two”? How about “u” vs “you”? Are you really saving much time by dropping letters? I’d say no. Are you helping the reader understanding your message? Again, no. In fact, I’ve seen instances where someone has used “2″, and I’ve been left guessing which word they actually meant.

Grammar is an issue too… but less so. Probably the worst problem here, is people writing big long sentences with no breaks. Big blocks of text are hard to read too.

SI units are another point of confusion — more than once I’ve commented to someone about how quick their sub-Hz computer is, not everybody understands that SI units are case-sensitive. This is particularly important when asking networking-related questions… is “mbps”, MegaBytes per second, Megabits per second, Millibits per second?? Okay, B (bytes) vs b (bits) was never standardised, even though this is the common convention, but to be sure, perhaps MBytes or Mbits is better ;-).

Anyway… enough of my ranting… I’ve got it out of my system now. Just to say, next time you’re writing an email to one of us, please do us a favour, and write your message properly. Pretty please?

This entry was posted on Monday, September 4th, 2006 at 11:41 pm and is filed under Rants, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.