I have several business contacts and family members that are otherwise intelligent and computer-literate who throw all grammar, spelling, and basic human communication out the window when it comes to writing e-mails or sending text messages. These are people with PhD’s, people with high-paying jobs, and people that are otherwise (verbally, interpersonally) excellent communicators.
An average e-mail from one such person could look something like this -
This sounds like the person is drunk or mentally impaired, but it’s clearly not the case. Am I just seeing a weird informality toward the electronic medium, or is there some sort of cognitive freakout happening here?
I will write i instead of I when I am using my Apple brand mobile telephone, because I’m too lazy to press the shift key. I know that this device has a feature that will correct for this automatically, but as I often write in a language other than English, I have disabled it.
I sometimes spell cute, with a couple different friends. Just to keep things from getting boring. Most commonly, variations on “Hello,” “Goodbye,” and the person’s name.
I (and possibly a good number of voracious-reader types, Dopers, etc) experience the written word with considerable immediacy, and with what I might call a mild synesthesia for grammar, spelling, and punctuation. For example, I actually “hear” the OP’s message as sort of a slurred, mispronounced mess, and I “hear” other run-on, uncapitalized passages in an unintelligent monotone, even if I’m logically aware of what the intended message is, and I know the writer’s normal speaking style. (Typography can have a strong effect, too, but I’m probably an extreme case.)
It’s a quirk, not the normal reaction, if my smart friends/atrocious spellers are to be believed. They’re just better at filtering out the noise, so they assume that most people won’t be bothered if they cave to laziness or peer pressure in casual messages.
But that’s not to say I don’t wish that people would stop using that facade of extreme stupidity around me. Sigh. Twitch.
I think the laziness is excused by the relative inconvenience of such a small keyboard, esp. a ten key plus cell phone, if we’re speaking of text. If they type that way in emails, I can’t excuse it. I pride myself on using full words and even punctuation in my text messages. I do use homonemes like ‘Prolly’ for probably sometimes, but that’s a style thing.
By many, the internet is not taken very seriously as a method of communication. Most of my family and friends who are not into the internet in a big way communicate using ‘text’ speech. Even on instant messaging programs and e-mails or Facebook where you have a keyboard, have all the time in the world to write properly. I think part of it must be that they’re not used to using a keyboard to talk.
I can type reasonably fast, typist speed, so it’s all quite natural to me to communicate properly via text. I can imagine though, for those that are not familiar with it, it just won’t seem like ‘real communication’. It’s too slow and cumbersome. You can’t see the other person, read their body language etc. I imagine for some that would put up a barrier in taking text communication seriously.
I often text message people in a strong Yorkshire dialect…tha nos.
Specifically when it comes to texting and you don’t have a normal keyboard in front of you but are doing the little phonepad thing, it’s annoying and slow. So I can understand shorthand in texting… even though it’s so drilled into me that I can’t bear to type “u” instead of “you”, I do forego some punctuation like apostrophes and I certainly don’t take the time to capitalize “I” in texts.
wunderkammer, I think your response is astute. Upon reading your description, I realized that is exactly what I do. I’m with you regarding typography, too.
I do that on this message board, and on other places on the internet, and in informal emails.
When i first started joining message boards and sending lots of email, i was used to working with MS Word, which would automatically capitalize a standalone i, and my habit of not pushing Shift before i continued over to my other forms of communication.
Now, i continue to not use the Shift key for i, except for communications where some level of formality is important. Sometimes, at the end of such communications, i have to deliberately go back through the email and make sure i haven’t left any uncapitalized i’s lying around.
I know my habit probably annoys some people, including some on this message board, but it would take quite an effort of will to change it now. I guess one solution would be to compose all my posts and emails in MS Word, then cut and paste to the browser or the email client.
Different communication modalities have different patterns of rhetoric associated with them; this is one reason why somebody reading a pre-written speech, for example, typically sounds unnatural. Similarly, accurate written transcripts of spoken communication are often surprisingly unintelligible.
Many moons ago, I did an (unpublished) study on differences in rhetorical styles around email as compared to other modalities. It turned out that people writing email approached it as being closer to spoken rhetoric (with the “casual and sloppy” connotations), whereas people reading email approached it as being closer to written rhetoric (with the “careful and structured” connotations).
So people writing the email are approaching it from a different perspective than people reading the email. They’re not deliberately intending to be as sloppy as you’re perceiving them to be.