My current favourite, from Robert's Virtual Soapbox

I am very leery of joining the bleating masses where “patriotism” is concerned.  Fierce “patriotism” – jingoism – is a quick and easy recipe for world war.  I found the post 9-11-01 flurry of U.S. flags to be a disturbing rather than comforting development.  “United We Stand,” we claimed, but what I saw was “Together in Fear We Huddle.”

First it was Ebonics, now it's Webonics

Nu Shortcuts in School R 2 Much 4 Teachers

According to the New York Times article, teachers are having difficulty getting students to write complete words.  So many kids have gotten used to the shorthand used for instant messanging that they now turn in school papers filled with "b4"s, "ur"s and "oic"s. And, as is the norm for teens, they don't see what the big fuss is.  One of the more common excuses is that when they're proofreading papers, they're so used to seeing the shorthand in their IMs that they don't even notice it in their papers.

When I was still in school (back in the stone ages, obviously) I remember their being a bit of concern that, thanks to a popular antacid commercial, students really would think that relief is spells R-O-L-A-I-D-S.  I suspect that was a more popular anecdote than an actual occurrence, but at the time it was considered a big deal.

Now we're to the point where the Internet has helped create almost a new language from the shorthand used for IMs and chat rooms (and, far too often, in e-mail as well).  Here's the problem, though.  While the kids may not think that its that big of a deal, they seem to be unaware that, in the professional world, there are places where such spellings are simply inappropriate.

Several years ago I worked for a company where we were required to take detailed notes on the phone calls we were engaged in.  In that context, I frequently resorted to using web-like shorthand simply because I was trying to type as fast as the conversation was happening and because I had limited space in which to record my notes.  This was not a problem, as many other operators did the same and, over the years, a kind of note-speak had developed.  When I was moved to a different position later, however, I had to write letters to customer and, more often than I'd like, to their lawyers as well.  For them, complete words and actual sentences were necessary.  No matter how much I was used to reading or writing the shorthand in the notes (and still had to at that point, since I had to enter notes on every letter I wrote), I had to be able to catch any such slips in the letters - my company's credibility was riding on it, to an extent.

The problem facing todays students isn't that they shouldn't use web shorthand or that web shorthand is somehow "bad"; what they seem to be failing to realize is that its just as important to recognize when standard English is necessary, and be able to use it in those situation. I fully support teachers who give lower grades for papers where the shorthand forms are used, and I hope that the school boards will back them up if parents start to complain.  And don't think they wouldn't - if they can get hacked off at teachers for lowering grades or even failing a student for cheating, getting upset over a lowered grade because a paper was written partially in web-speak is nothing.