I fully understand when people use internet shorthand while visiting a chat room. The action is fast and furious and there is no time to spell out every word and form sentences properly. What I do not understand, however, is why people insist on carrying this mangled excuse for the English language into their e-mail communications as well. There is no time constraint when writing a letter or even a short note, so why can't people take the time to use the English language as it was meant to be used? Instead I get an indecipherable string of codes requiring some sort of cyber-rosetta stone to decrypt. Would a little proper sentence structure be so bad? Would it hurt too much to add some punctuation marks? Would the fingers become blistered at the concept of spelling out the words?
I fear for the current and future generations of children and for the future of the English language. I can just imagine a current high school student who is internet-savvy writing a cover letter for a job in a few years:
dear sir... i m the person 4 u... skils... work hard... btw colege degree... bs... hire me pls...
What scares me the most is that the employer might actually understand and accept this sort of gibberish.
Our language is a wonderful thing and its written form can be used to express thoughts, feelings, emotions, or even the basic descriptions of events in ways that other languages can not. Don't sell it short in the interest of saving 30 seconds of typing.
Mike