Saturday, June 27, 2009

A bit of a rant: What did you say?

Maybe I'm getting old, maybe it is my growing love & respect for writing, maybe it is my English teacher mother's influence on me but sometimes I just have no idea what someone is saying when they write a comment (not here but on another media outlet I am on).

I can usually estimate fairly closely within a few words of a comment the general age or at least the generation of the author. I recently received a comment on one of my videos on YouTube that I really questioned if it was in English at all. I am fairly sure this person had to have been under the age of 18...if not, this is just sad & inexcusable.

First, there were no capital words. Irritating. At one point in the comment, I got the impression he/she was talking about some store but I'm not sure if it was the name of the store or the type of store.

Second, there was an absence of any kind of punctuation. Punctuation is so important. Now, I'm not an expert at it, & any of you teachers out there have probably mentally marked this whole post in red, but, at least I use periods, question marks, exclamation points, whatever necessary to indicate that I have finished that particular statement.

My final, irritation with this comment was the great usage of abbreviations for things. I swear, every other word was a series of letters, I'm sure represented something but I'm not sure what (espcially with no capitalizing or periods). This kind of writing makes me think the person writing it must be drunk or some type of mental illness. This is usually the number one indicator as to the age of the author, however.

Anyway, that rant is over. :)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Amen to that! I require that my daughter use full grammar and punctuation when she texts so that she does not develop bad habits. I told her if she wants a phone she must not take shortcuts.

Unknown said...

I don't mind using them every once in awhile but not an entire sentence. Ugh. Very annoying. It is like that commercial where the mom is getting on to her teenage daughter about her phone & then the grandma starts talking that way too. Funny commercial because it is so annoying in real life (IRL). :)