The Older I get the Less I Can Stand Teenagers!
I was not necessarily talking about proper sentence construction. I'm talking about shortening words by 2-4 letters to the point that unless you know what is meant, it is unreadable, as if that is saving any amount of time that is noteworthy.
This will be my last reply to this matter; please try to understand, I'm tired of this stupid nonsense that has thread jacked this particular thread. If any further comments are deemed necessary, then pm me with them. Other than that, my last words for this reply are, WHO DAT!!
Those abbreviations began to be popular on informal internet message boards but became a crutch of communication for IM'ing and texting via cell phones and the like.
What's wrong with that?
I have graded thousands of papers and rare was the "lol" or "sup" or "cu l8r" I came across.
Seems to me that the students are aware of audience and are savvy enough to produce, or attempt to produce, a piece of formal writing when it's necessary and called for and will resort to shorthand informalities with their friends.
Do you speak to your friends in the same way you do in a job interview or in front of a conference audience? I know I don't.
I text with my friends and will resort to the same shorthand you're referring to. But I also know how to move across contexts, from a dialog standpoint, depending on the situation. Oral or written. I write differently in emails than I do in papers I'm submitting to journals. I speak differently to my advisor than I do to the department chair when I am requesting funding. I will chat via google documents with other scholars over a strictly electronic medium differently than I do my guildmates in World of Warcraft or my friends in a Starcraft match.
This generalization is inaccurate.
And you are stating your opinion - two now that are clearly opinions and I think are wrong - claiming they are "fact" which is nonsensical.
As for the second point - this is a message board. You made two ludicrous claims based on limited interaction and stereotypes and decided to call them facts and you got called out on it.
Why should the discussion on a message board end like that? To say "Well, when I said XXX that should've been the end of the discussion - just PM me" What you are exhibiting, in my opinion, is precisely what this thread is about: What are your feelings about teenagers and why do you feel that way? Is it justified? Is it a product of age? Etc... I think your posts demonstrate key points for talking about a typical frustration expressed about teenagers - the way they informally communicate, in a way that you don't understand fully. So I don't agree that it should be moved to a strictly-PM discussion. It's not as if it's off-topic and should be moved to another arena for discussion.
You know as well as I that message boards don't operate that way. You make claims that several people disagrees with and then you expect them to just PM you? :jpshakehead:
C'mon....
edit: SaintJ beat me to the first point