Am I in a minority or are there others who get easily distracted and annoyed when reading large posts where the writer uses ‘n’ for ‘and’, ‘r’ for ‘are’, tho’ for ‘though’ ‘k’ for ‘ok’ (!!) and all kinds of other crazy abbreviations? 

They made sense before the advent of the Smartphones when we cramped a message within 180 characters in a text message. Smartphones and AI have made it easy to select the word rather than type it, with no restrictions on number of characters. So, why does the habit persist? It’s particularly annoying when practiced by a generation when Wren and Martin was shoved down your throat till one could rattle of figures of speech in our dreams and it got into the DNA. I can hear some say, ‘Wren and Martin’, what??

Twitter, the modern day test for brevity, has also doubled the number of characters in a tweet making it easier to frame a thought rather than use one’s ingenuity of restricting it to 140 characters! Some, smartly number their tweets and use multiple ones rather than sacrifice their grammar!

I asked a few Gen Zs and millennials on their view on writing and it appears that the intelligent ones find such writing really uncool. It’s not ‘FB’ but Facebook, they say. Time to get on to this bandwagon. There is hope. 

Categories: Writing