Honestly, I think it’s a vocal minority upset about the verbal tics. They don’t bother me in the slightest. The function of language is to communicate and I’ve never seen those idiosyncrasies obfuscate your point. I suspect if people weren’t already upset about other things it wouldn’t seem like a big deal.
It’s not a tic though. He openly admits that he does it on purpose.
There are plenty of other people here who have odd posting affectations, like Banquet_Bear starting every post with an ellipsis, or Wendell_Wagner quoting like it’s 1999. The difference is that most Dopers aren’t doing stuff like that while derailing threads.
Funnily, I did a lesson for my fourth graders today on almost exactly this point. Written conventions are there in large part to make written language mimic spoken language. Most of the time, you don’t want people to pay attention to your specific choices about conventions. (Most of the time, you’re not e.e. cummings).
win sumthng iz mispeld, u kan red it, butt it taxe mor bran powr to red it.
The brain power that’s spent deciphering the unconventional spelling draws attention to the spelling itself, creating a double-whammy: instead of paying attention to the content of your writing, to its concepts, the reader ends up spending effort deciphering the writing, and then spends more effort thinking about why you made those unconventional decisions.
With my fourth graders, I was just desperately hoping to persuade them that they should follow written conventions even when they didn’t understand why it was important. With grown-ass adults, I end up feeling a little irked when they waste my brain-power on stubbornly idiosyncratic spelling decisions like “enuf.” It makes me (and most other fluent readers) slightly less able to focus on their points, and in doing so comes across as rude in much the same way that it’d be rude during a conversation to be snot-snorting.
But I am willing to change.
Got four quarters for a dollar?
Nitpick: My understanding is that E. E. Cummings didn’t write his name in all lower case. It was a gimmick his publisher thought up for the book jackets—the guy whose poetry defies conventional capitalization and punctuation—we wrote his name like that too!
That is correct.
We now know which buttons to push to get get @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness angry enuf to draw a mod note. 
Seriously, this is an over the top reaction. I’m pretty sure I can also speak for most fluent readers that they can read "enuf "just fine without their heads exploding or thinking they are mortally offended. Just because you may gather some grammar nazis on your side doesn’t mean you are right.
Writing varies a lot, from formal to informal. You should be teaching your students the difference between the two, not that they should not write informally. A lot of communication between people today is done very informally, with many abbreviations and acronyms and shorthand. My guess is it will only get more so. Most people don’t write like their parents wrote, why should their kids write like them?
I assume you don’t tell your kids not to code switch when they speak. Why tell them not to when they write something personal instead of business related?
Personally, I think thru should replace through and tho should replace though. I’ve been using them for years and nobody has questioned my use or asked what I meant because their brain exploded from figuring out what I meant. Language changes often or we would still have people running on about thee and thou and bare bodkins.
Let me start with this point first. Just tonight I came across “tho” for “though” in a purportedly informational online article from a source that I thought was at least somewhat semi-reputable. And then a few sentences later in the same article, I found (as nearly as I can recall) “… but like, rly, who cares?”. OK, valley girl, you go off and text all your teenage friends, I’m done here. For me, the article had lost any claim to serious writing and any credibility it may ever have had. And I went back to reading the New Yorker.
You’re going out on a limb here lecturing @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness about writing. He is in fact one of the posters I specifically had in mind when I wrote upthread that “We have skilled and literate writers here who nevertheless like to use informal colloquialisms and slang, often to good effect. It makes their posts effective and often a pleasant read for just that reason. This is the essence of being “skilled”.”
And as I concluded up there, “It’s not at all the same when a usage is just juvenile and seems to be just a deliberate affectation for no reason other than intentional annoyance or to score some kind of point.” So to reiterate, this is not about formality, and neither is it about the evolution of language. It’s about a purposeless, stubborn affectation that seems to be intended only to annoy. You are not wrong in some of your general points, but they are completely irrelevant here.
Yes, language changes, but it’s a process of collectively agreed evolution. It can’t be forced unilaterally. A new expression appears, or a new form of an old one, and sufficient numbers of people agree that it has value, some sort of utility in communication, so the innovation persists. It can’t be imposed by fiat.
More importantly, communication itself is collaborative. The message is generated by one party, and received and interpreted by the other party. For this process to work, the first party must understand — must concede — the essential role of the other party. The message to be transmitted must conform to all sorts of compromises for comprehension to occur. The communicator must adapt to the recipient, as much as, or more than, the recipient must adapt to the communicator. To do otherwise risks breakdown, and besides is simply rude.
Aw, shucks! Seriously, thank you for the very kind words.
Wow, that looked like “angry” to you? Weird.
The rest of your post is a pretty silly misunderstanding of what I said, but I’m okay with your not getting it; I’m not paid to teach you.
You could teach him, but you’d have to charge?
I think the “over the top reaction” is conflating “a little irked” with “heads exploding.”
Likewise “slightly less able to focus” with “mortally offended.”
I find this discussion of style and orthography interesting, but mostly irrelevant to this thread. Unless i see objections in the next hour or so, i plan to split off some posts into a new thread, probably in IMHO. (I’ll leave a link)
It got to be a bit tangential, though definitely related to one of the things that was irksome about DrDeth’s posting habits. But the point was made and I think we’re done with the digression. At least I am. If I or anyone has any more to say, we can split off a new thread for it.
For what it’s worth, my comment in the grammar-and-style sidebar was consciously intended to tie back to the original topic of why a given poster’s insistence on flouting conventions would be seen as abrasive. It’s a tangent, but not a completely detached one.
No need to split it off, I don’t think we need to discuss this further.
To me, the use of “a alternate” way of writing is analogous to “Regards, Shodan” or “let’s go down to the quarry etc. etc.” Of course it’s trivial, but the “insistence on flouting conventions,” as you aptly put it, is telling.
You mean if a phrase, like, say, “Let’s go to the quarry and throw stuff down there!” doesn’t catch on, dropping it would be a good idea?