It will seriously damage your credibility, yes. It will lower their opinion of you, that you didn’t know any better, or, you knew and didn’t care and did it anyway. How could it not color someone’s opinion of you?
If what you are saying is compelling enough, some may overlook your annoying typing habits to a certain degree. But few will overlook it 100%, especially, once again, if they KNOW that you KNOW that it’s annoying and you insist on doing it anyway.
But if someone mentions how annoying it is, in passing, and you give them this same song and dance about how it shouldn’t matter, then BAM! Right then and there, you are gonna be deemed an idiot.
That’s how it is. Can’t you already tell that from the responses of this thread?
I wasn’t planning on commenting, because many others have already expressed the points I wanted to make. However, I see from this comment that you have ignored the people who have said that this usage would actually break the flow of reading, and they would have to go back and re-read. This is the case for me as well. I tend to read very fast, and abbreviations such as this are very annoying. If I run into too many of these, I figure that the writer doesn’t care enough about what he’s writing to put it in the most easily accessible standard English. Why should I care about it either, then?
So, my guess is that I will be ignoring (and skipping over) your usage of the letter “u” for “you,” etcetera. Of course, I will also be skipping over your entire post, as well.
I’ll ask you the question I asked in the thread that spawned this one. You do want people to read your posts, don’t you? You do want people to take your words seriously, don’t you?
(and on preview, I see that yosemitebabe has just said what I mean to say. Oh, if only I had saved those precious milliseconds by shortening three-letter words to one…)
Still playing this old tune, eh? If you must know, I read straight through txt without a blip, got tangled around lower-case im. I read through msg-type until I got to debate-type, at which point I made the mental comparison and concluded, “Compared to the second one, I guess the first one means a message board where abbreviations are common.”
It’s not easy to read through a lot of abbreviations—but that’s not my point and it never was, except as related to people who do not natively comprehend English. Your snarky point was addressed to the wrong debater. You’ve already heard from a poster in Sweden who agrees with my basic point—who says explicitly that your easy-to-comprehend premise is dead wrong—and still you pretend as if “u” is the same difficulty to read as “you?” You’re a fool, and what’s more, you’re a fool who won’t even confront the evidence.
If you want more, just check the ratio of posts to views of your precious Pit thread. Lots of people are taking the trouble to look into the thread, and are people leaping to your defense? No—and so far we’ve heard from a couple of people who hadn’t planned to comment because their arguments had already been made.
Delude yourself, if you wish, that the majority of 40,000 posters will enjoy your dumbed-down English. Ignore the testimony of non-English speakers that it is not easy to read. Pretend that your silk purse is still a valid commodity though you assemble it from a sow’s ear. You will get out of this message board exactly what you put into it.
Okay, fine. Maybe there’s only a small percentage of posters here who feel the need to correct you on your erroneous usage. However, I would guess that most of those posters who aren’t chiming in on this could be described by what Tengu just said. Here, let me quote it for you , in case you missed it the first time.
(Thanks, Fish, just what I wanted to say. It’s not that I don’t type fast, it’s that I type too much… Where’s an editor when you need one?)
I seem to recall reading that the SDMB Staff is trying to raise the tone of this board. An increasing number of people taking single-letter shortcuts for three-letter words probably isn’t what they had in mind.
Ah, so that’s why you politely referred to everyone as holier-than-thou, brain-strained, hypocrites-by-implication anal-retentives worthy only of your mockery for conserving their precious milliseconds of calculation, and then asked people not to bother responding because their opinions weren’t worth your time. Good thinking, that. Way to practice what you preach. :rolleyes:
You just said “u r.” What does that mean? Help me out, I’m totally lost here, what are you trying to say?
…
Oh! I get it! U means “you!” That is so clever! And the “r” means…wait, wait, let me get this…“are?”
But then what’s “4” mean!? I’m so confused. I have no idea what you’re saying.
:rolleyes:
Yes.
A similiar thing happened to me; I was in a Spanish-speaking chatroom for a considerable time before I realized that “K” was supposed to mean “que.”
But seriously, I think the main problem with “u” is not the fact that it makes the text harder to read (which it does) or that people won’t understand it (don’t worry, they do.) The problem is the attitude it conveys…I always get the impression that the person using “u” is “lazy.” Not “lazy” as in “doesn’t do a lot of physical activity” but “lazy” as in “stupid teenager who sees ‘laziness’ as a source of pride because it seems rebellious.” Give me a break. (If you’ve met this person, you know what I’m talking about–I’ll admit, it used to be me.)
Since I don’t have anything better to do right now, I thought it might be worthwhile to go ahead and quantify what you’re talking about here. So I went back over the thread and divided every one who posted to it into four categories:
[ul]
[li]Pro-U: people who agree with you that abbreviations like ‘u’ are acceptable;[/li][li]Anti-U: people who disagree. This group encompasses several camps: those who think it’s annoying, and makes you look like an idiot; those who think it is harder to read; and those who advise against it as being against the standards of ths board.[/li][li]Neutral: people who apparently don’t gve a shit.[/li][li]Unknown: people whose attitudes I could not discern with certainty based on their posts in this thread. (Although I’m pretty sure some of them would be in the Anti camp, but didn’t specifically say so here.)[/ul][/li]
Okay, here’s the breakdown (as of this typing):
Anti-U Ilsa_Lund
FilmGeek
heater
Bricker
Fish
Tusculan
erislover
Snooooopy
Elysian
Diogenes the Cynic
overlyverbose
Siege
Smeghead
hopefool
Musicat
Garnet
fluiddruid
Jonathan Chance
Infectous Lass
Legolamb
CrazyCatLady
Ferrous
yosemitebabe
Tengu
Baldwin
Gyrate
Thylacine
Miller
Starving Artist
gooti
Ravenman
The Gaspode
clairobscur
splatterpunk
Tentacle Monster
Ruby
pulykamell
Doc Nickel
collinsc
RobuSensei
Jeff Olsen
KJ
Total: 42 posters
Neutral Earl of the CC
Manduck
Shade
Dijon Warlock
Total: 4 posters
Unknown: mic84
Mr. Blue Sky
elfbabe* Shodan* SmackFu
Qadgop the Mercotan* Necro Romancer** This Year’s Model
2nd Law
Total: 9 posters
I’m fairly sure these folks are Anti, but I can’t say for certain based on their posts here.
**I didn’t even try to read that leetspeak crap, so I have no idea if he was supporting the OP or not.
You may notice that the posters in the Anti column represent a pretty broad range of attitudes and interests, and include several people who disagree with each other on practically everything. On this issue, they are united.
So, Civil Defense, to the extent that the posters in this thread represent a meaningful sample of the total population of the SDMB, roughly 71% of Dopers are not worth your time to read or respond to. Kinda makes one wonder what you’re doing here, ya know?
…
(Yes, I do have too much time on my hands. Why do you ask?)
Same here. In fact, the voice in my head doesn’t pronounce “u” as “you” it pronounces it as “ooo”. It pronounces “r” as “rrrr” and “ur” not as “you’re” but as “urrrrr” etc. So basically, the narration I hear in my head sounds like a bad comedian’s impression of a mentally retarded person. And so that is how I picture the person who is typing. shrug
Then there is also the word-shape issue that other people have touched on. Word shapes help us read faster. That is why it TaKeS lONgeR tO rEAd StuFf WriTTEn lIKe ThIS. And that is yet another reason why things like “u” “r” “ur” etc are annoying as hell.
When I see someone typing like that, I have zero respect for what they say and pretty much assume that they are of subaverage intelligence. In fact, I will generally stop reading what they say and skip over it entirely. They may be great people… but they can’t be bothered to type the words out and I can’t be bothered to find out if they aren’t morons after all. And you know what? I’d say the majority of the people on this board feel the same way to one degree or another.
And things like BRB, LOL, and WTF aren’t abbreviations, they’re acronyms. Difference.
For the record, I don’t care if it’s email, IMs, message board posts, or your doctoral thesis… it annoys me in all instances. The ONLY time I could understand it is if you were typing on something that severely limited the number of characters you could send, such as a text pager or something.
Speaking as someone who has been on the SDMB for something approaching 8 years, I think I can say that you’re wrong. It would stand out like a sore thumb to 95% of the people on this board. And yes, most of them would think less of you for it. And it won’t just be the people who get “bend out of shape” over it, either. There will be plenty of people who wouldn’t dream of saying anything or getting upset… but they will, none the less, think less of you.
I just wanted to say that this notion is totally untrue. As somebody who has to work with business owners and corporate officers day in and day out helping them sort through financial matters, I can tell you that just because somebody owns a business–even if it’s a successful one, doesn’t mean that they are intelligent. Not in the slightest.
Some of the dumbest, most obnoxious people in the world I’ve had the displeasure of meeting have been presidents and vice presidents of companies. I’m not being nitpicky, either. When a person has been in business for more than ten or twenty years, and is completely mystified when you ask them questions like “Are you for-profit or non-profit?” and “Are you incorporated?”, they are -stupid-.
Not that some of the company officers I’ve talked to haven’t been nice and on track with everything. But you’d be amazed at how sloppy most of them are. Your VP sounds like one of them, if he can’t be bothered to send out memos in proper English.
You are communicating a lot more than you are willing to acknowledge.
It’s like reading a letter where all of the i’s are dotted with little hearts. It is hard to take the content seriously when it is written that way.
“Form” is about the whole – not about a part. If you choose to use u and r, that particular post has poor form. Meanwhile, the reader who is looking for clues about your attitude has found two already.
The content would have to be powerful indeed to overcome the handicaps that you are insistent shouldn’t matter.
Going to echo what Ashtar said, seeing as I have several in my gene pool. And for the record, I’m against writing in shorthand when it comes to public postings. As many people have already stated, it’s hard to take anyone seriously when they type that way.
