03-04-2003, 05:16 PM
Man, that IS bad. I think we had this debate last year when there was that hullaballoo on slashdot about half-arsed language in school. Back in school, I ALWAYS used the best spelling possible(straight 95% except for words like mischievous, plural of handkerchief, etc) Not surprisingly, I topped the classes in English. :P And the punishment for misspelling words in anything you were assigned for English class was severe. Rewrite the entire sentence 10 times, CORRECTLY. (Mental note, stop using capitalisations to stress things when writing) I'm guessing that with the current prevalence of computers in schools, more students are getting used to typing in short-form(glad my mother taught me to how to type properly at the age of 8), thinking that by saving time typing in short-form, they will also save the reader time since the reader will have less characters to read(also because they are a bunch of .lackadaisical dillweeds who would rather play a game like Counterstrike over a quiet hour of Scrabble :P), not realising that to a person who is not well-versed in this so-called "leet-speak", the entire thing would probably take twice as long to decipher. I believe this was also brought up in the old debate about this topic on the old forums.