The posters may be the victims of a poor text-guessing program like the one my Sprint phone uses. It can be nearly impossible to refuse the phone’s guess as to what word I am trying to type, and rather than delete and re-type the whole sentence I’ll often let several mistakes stand.
Another possibility is the purposeful use of “L33t” which is a dialect in and of itself. It was originally a sort of short-hand, but now I’d compare it more to Cockney rhyming slang; it has become a way of filtering noobs from leets. Leet - Wikipedia Truth be told though, since about Y2K I haven’t seen real web elites using this; it’s more likely to indicate a young’un wishing to appear to be L33t. LOL!
It’s also a possibility that the brain is simply working faster than the fingers can type. This is a common cause of poor handwriting as well. The attempt to communicate in stream of consciousness can be defeated by a lack of typing skill. Or, as in my case, the right hand types faster than the left, which produces quite a few bizarre misspellings and capitalization errors.
If I am sending a quick one-line message to a colleague by e-mail, I don’t tend to bother with capital letters and punctuation, and neither do they. If I’m sending a more important message, or writing to someone outside the company, I write as carefully as I would a letter.
The more non-standard it gets, the longer it takes (me) to read. I have seen posts in “leet-speak” on message boards defending the “right” to write like that - sure, they can write any way they like, but I read the first paragraph, and skimmed the rest, then eventually just ignored the posts from that person.
Communication has a goal: to communicate. If the writer makes it more difficult than it is worth for the reader, the communication stops being effective. There are other factors involved, but bad grammar and spelling make reading things difficult, and so if there is no other compelling reason for me to read, the lazy post is lost on me. I have also seen excessive run-on sentences and 2-page paragraphs with no structure, and I loose interest in those pretty quick too.
Part of the reason that these writing conventions evolved was to keep written language clear - ignore them and the writer risks being ignored or misunderstood. There is already a huge risk of misunderstandings in modern electronic text communications anyway, I see no reason to make it worse.
no intentional irony, I just can’t spell. I would have to go to a dictionary to figure out what is the right spelling for words like that. I think I am doing good to get “their” and “there” correct most of the time.
I also have always had trouble with run-on sentences, if that is the problem with the comma.
I appreciate the assumption that I was trying to be funny! Thanks. My sarcasm is rarely that subtle.
This question interests me, because I know of two whole and entire professors of Philosophy who write emails like this! I have never understood how this could be.
I love this. This, as opposed to, say, incomplete professors, or partial professors, or even fractional professors. heh heh “whole and entire professors.” heh heh