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Text Talk, Tweeting and Typos – So whut!?

Studying English Language really makes you focus on the pure heart and soulof writing, whether it be a memo, a Facebook message to a friend or thereview of last night’s telly. I know I’m not the only one. I’ve seen them; theelite who preach the rules of apostrophes, and question spellings of hashtags.I’ve done it myself, and I praise those who stand up for the prescriptivism of Standard English – yeah, check me and my fancy terminology.I’m often shocked by celebrities using text talk and misspelling words over Twitter – my favourite mis-typer is Lord Sugar. He built his whole televisionshow on professional business minds, yet he struggles to construct a fullsentence in Virtual Land. He is, amongst the dedicated Twitter users, mostknown for his ongoing ‘feud’ with Piers Morgan, but most of his insults aremis-spelt, unstructured and completely lacking in grammar. A fine exampleincludes

“the reason its most discarded is because it's the MOST purchasedat airports so would be most likely to be left ”,

tweeted just yesterday.Personally, I have always found that an insult sits particularly well with theperfect use of full stops and phrasings.However, the more you think about it and the more you look at, the more yourealise how irrelevant it is. I have judged those who use bad spelling, andthose who can’t construct a sentence, perhaps associating these mistakeswith stupidity and ignorance (depending on the situation, of course - I havefound this is usually some git trying to be clever over Twitter) - but should I?Should we base our opinions on the misspellings of others?Even now, Microsoft Word is trying to tell me I’ve spelt things wrong, andhave used fragments (that I should consider revising) all the way through.Sure, maybe I have, but is it ruining your reading of my perhaps “should-consider-revising” opinions? I hope not.Who really cares about punctuation and sentence structure, apart from yourold Sixth Form teachers? Surely we should be caring more about what isbeing written, rather than how it’s presented. Would we favour a racist joke if it was punctuated correctly and used fancy words? Would we ignore a cry forhelp from a lonely bullying victim if it didn’t fulfill the essential essay-markingcriteria? You see my point. The use of Twitter and Facebook has, of course, changed the way we use andlook at language. No one wants to read an essay, so shortenings andabbreviations work well – our language has adapted to modern society andwe should be looking upon it with open arms. As the quote has always said,Don’t Judge A Book By It’s Cover – it’s all about reading what is actually beingsaid, rather than how it is written. The use of language as a tool to express ourselves, to engage in debate and