R-E-S-P-E-C-T Your Reader

Someone recently relayed this message to me. It was sent to him by someone on the Internets:

"hey sxc , wat u doin do u hve msn or anotha chat? :)try chat sometim.hve a webcam i use thats instead of a pic and least u no its me so is thats ok so i cn at least shw u wat i look lyk so u no who u r chating to lol"

Grammar and spelling seem to be dying a rapid death. I pity my sister, a college English professor, when I read what her students are passing off as papers. I had a class in undergrad in which we had to write a fake résumé. The professor told us that if we had two grammatical errors, we'd receive an "F" on the assignment. The class groaned. And I immediately thought, "If it were a real résumé, and it had two grammatical errors, you idiots wouldn't be getting the job. You should be thanking the professor for being a hardass."

The best advice I ever learned about writing came from law school. It's a shame that teachers do not stress it at younger ages. The advice is simple: The purpose of good writing is to make your point as clearly as possible to your reader.

If your words require a lengthy description, be liberal with your words. If a paragraph will do, use a paragraph. Someone once asked Abe Lincoln--a rather tall guy--how long a man's legs should be. Lincoln replied that they should be long enough to reach the ground. Touché, Mr. President.

But length isn't the worst problem today. That would be the inability to hold down the shift key, inability to properly punctuate, and this incessant abbreviation. OMG, englsh nvr usd 2 b this silly be4! LOLz.

When you get right down to it, it's a problem of disrespect. Selfishness. It's an arrogant/careless writer who cares more about himself than about the person for whom he is writing. I have no proof to back up this claim, but I suspect people who write craptastic blurbs like the one above are the same type of people who hit little old ladies with their cars, steal from the collection plate, and fail to use deodorant.