Some questions to ponder:
- When you’re using your mobile phone, do you prefer texting or making a call?
- When you’re online, how do you usually type your conversation? Do you use “thx”, “btw”, “asap”, “fyi”, “lol” and many other often?
- Do you use number to replace certain texts, for instance 4 -> for, 2 -> to?
- Do you active participant in certain forums?
My answers are: texting, quite often, no and no.
Some of my friends are heavy abbreviation user. They can shortened almost everything, on most of occasions from chatting to texting. Different generation has its abbreviation lingo, and of course, different cultures has different abbreviated form of words too. (hmm this is quite interesting isn’t it? maybe one day we can write this topic for fun :))
Obviously, those are happened in informal occasion, between colleagues, friends, or maybe family.
Well, in my opinion (they use IMHO – in my humble opinion in forums) there are many reasons behind it, as many years back Internet chatting like mIRC was really popular (I recalled that most likely to be my first exposure to those lingo)
Despite the popularity of it, I still prefer to write in a normal way. Some say by using it looks cooler, while others say to save time. I’m kind of agree with the second one. I’m aware that we’re sometimes so busy, but when it comes to ask for a help or explain things to other, we feel that our precious times are being stolen by typing. Of course, talking or explaining things face to face would be much faster, but on a certain time, we can’t just go to meet up with the other party. Thus we use written communication.
So, to save as much as time as possible, we’ll do whatever things to speed up our typing – especially if we’re a slow typer. In the end, we may come out with shortened most of the words (I also had friend who likes to remove all vocals from the word which supported by some research that human brain can understand it anyway).
But, do we really save time by doing it?
It can be more wasting time, sometimes, when the other party didn’t even understand about what we’re trying to describe or explain to them. Then we may end up by explaining for one more time to them. We’ll lose more time here hey?
Well, I believe, writing in short form can be handy sometimes, but we don’t need to use it all the time..
In my personal experience, writing in nice proper form also helps me to sort things out from my head. Like a brief pause. A pause to question myself. Do I really need to type this to my friend? Will the information be useful for them? Or we can say also a way to evaluate our thinking. Because when we’re such in a hurry, or maybe when some emotions are involved, we may say unnecessary things too..
Wrapping up, make it shorter or not, well, just depends on the situations, which I believe what everyone is doing. I write this because this thing fascinates me.
