posted
I generally read ROFLMAO as "roffel Mao" and then I sing "Mao Mao Mao Mao Mao Mao Mao" (tune = 1-3-5-7-5-3-1, like a vocal warmup) because I am a dork and remember a song that I heard in a play like five years ago.
quote:Personally, I find it rather rude of people when they send me an email without capitalization, limited punctuation, and purposeful misspelling. Am I really not worth your time to type "How are you?" instead of "how r u?"
True. When I'm talking on instant messenger or in an email and someone is getting on my nerves, and I want to send the message that I'm completely bored with the conversation, I answer in letters rather than words.
quote: When I'm talking on instant messenger or in an email and someone is getting on my nerves, and I want to send the message that I'm completely bored with the conversation, I answer in letters rather than words.
That would certainly make me want to end the conversation. Posts: 486 | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
I'm a graduate student of Linguistics at University of Illinois...I have a lot of experience studying orthographies and computer text as my resume could show.
There is an essential flaw in the argument our friend Book makes in this thread. It is that on conversation posts and on instant messaging systems, we type not how we write a paper or a newspaper article, but how we speak.
And how we speak is very far from how we write. We don't use full sentences all the time or even most of the time, with punctuation and such when we speak. We don't complete every word we say when we speak, and we often speak so quickly that words come out wrong by accident or severely abbreviated on purpose(i.e. the parallel being "ur" "lol" and whatnot). (Edit: We all speak quickly at times, and I would say we are not conscious of even most of our word abbreviations. But of course we are for some. We naturally want to convey our language more quickly. No one is exempt from this.)
Instant messaging or forum conversation has become a new medium of speech, you could say. Sign language is used just as adequately as the way we verbally speak because it appeared as an available technology for those who could not communicate because of deafness. In the same way, internet communication is a technology that has become available for those who couldn't before communicate across the world(i.e. everyone, since most can't so cheaply and efficiently speak to multiple people across the world).
Since we don't use punctuation in speech, it's not necessary in text conversation. It can be very useful for explicitly indicating pauses, because it's not a completely real time format.
And speaking like a "gangsta" or imitating AAVE may be annoying but it is not incorrect. It has been shown by the most famous sociolinguist(Bill Labov) that the African American Vernacular English(AAVE) is a more efficient mode of conveying information than our elite standard American English.
Finally, in speech(since we have established text conversation as essentially a mode of speech) there is no such thing as "proper grammar" since we are native speakers. Anything we say as human beings that is genuinely trying to communicate using our language system is valid, assuming we have full capability for it. And anyone who is not brain damaged has the full capability for human language communication.
(Edit: It does happen that people communicate ineffectively, but that is a different issue. Communicating effectively is not related to good punctuation or typing out every single word and in complete sentences or using proper grammar. It can have to do with vocabulary breadth, and aligning your grammar and social cues specifically with those of the people you're communicating with. This will mean changing your way of speaking for different people(at the risk of being remonstrated, which Book is doing in this thread).)
"Proper grammar" is made up by English professors and such, and has no necessity to exist. Except because it does exist, we should learn it because it's very important in order to be accepted by our society that expects us to use these grammatical norms.
(Edit: You can choose to treat every piece of text you write as though you were writing a newspaper article or an English paper, but its necessity is not evident and it is, relative to the casual text conversation mode, very inefficient!)
posted
"Finally, in speech(since we have established text conversation as essentially a mode of speech) there is no such thing as 'proper grammar' since we are native speakers."
Is that what they teachin' you at them fancy schools these days?
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
| IP: Logged |
quote:Because "its" means belonging to "it". And since a belonging is spelt with an apostrophe-s (or s-apostrophe), it should be "it's", just like "his" should be "he's", the should be "him's", "she's", and "hers" need be "her's", by the same token - and add "their's" to the list.
Strictly speaking, that is.
Actually, the use of the apostrophe to mark possessives is an error. Strictly speaking, that is.
The apostrophe was originally used to mark the deletion of letters in writing (like in don't and 'tis). Many possessive forms used to end with es, and the vowel was often deleted in speech. Then you had a situation in which some possessives were written with s and some with 's, and eventually the latter won out and became the standard way to write possessives.
The personal pronouns, however, are an entirely different class of words, and they do not decline the same way normal nouns do. For example, it's pretty obvious that his is not merely he + s. We recognize that these word are different and do not follow the same rules as normal nouns, so the extension of the 's rule never reached them.
Of course, nowadays it's reaching just about everything else, including plurals and third-person singular simple present verb forms. *shudder*
[ April 10, 2005, 01:42 PM: Message edited by: Jon Boy ]
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
| IP: Logged |
quote:I think it's far more likely that the reason is that very few people need to write exactly as the good book lays it out to be understood. All those d00ds and whatnot understand each other perfectly well for what they want to say, and in normal communication, if someone doesn't understand you, they can always ask you for clarification. I know many people (me included) who can write decently but are often just lazy writers because we have better things to do than make sure every little detail is perfect for every post and everything we say.
Good point. There are many people out there who could follow all the rules if they wanted to, but they don't care enough. I didn't really address that, because I was focusing on other things.
I was mostly trying to say that the internet hasn't made anyone stupid. If people write poorly, it's probably not because they're stupid. We now have a society where many people write all the time, but there are many people who haven't learned all the rules of good writing or simply don't care to (for whatever reason).
quote:This isn't to say that I don't think proper grammar is important. As I indicated, I do. It's just that I think it's a mistake to assume that just because people don't, they can't or, more importantly, that they need to.
I'm not making that assumption, and I hope it didn't appear that I was. I was trying to be an apologetic and explain why so many people write poorly. There certainly are a lot of people who need to learn to write better for their job, but perfect grammar doesn't matter so much if you're just chatting with friends online.
Really, it comes down to setting. If you're writing an email to your boss, you'd better darn well make sure you haven't made any stupid mistakes. But if you're in a situation where nobody cares about grammatical rules, then you shouldn't feel obligated to follow them.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
![[ROFL]](graemlins/rofl.gif)
