Grammarians, take note: The cutesy abbreviations that pockmark students' instant messages and cellphone text messages are showing up in students' papers, The Washington Post reports.
As the Post notes, there are good reasons for scholars to loathe IM-speak: According to one professor, the vernacular is "a very cryptic method of communication that does not lend itself to being transferred to academic writing." That seems like a hard point to argue.
Yet we can't help but wonder: Are IM abbreviations really such a terrible scourge? If a student decides to drop acronyms like "TTYL" or "LOL" into an essay, that's an offense that needs to be corrected. But if he or she slips a stray "b/c" (or even the dreaded "u," not "you") into an e-mail message for a professor, that seems simply tacky, not unreadably cryptic. As researchers at the University of Toronto have pointed out, IM users often shift from informal language to much clearer prose with surprising fluidity. –Brock Read
