Internet text pet peeves

Oh my, where to begin. As one born into the age of instant messaging i have taken it upon myself as a personal and public duty to root out the destruction of the English language via the internet. I get irritated frequently by the lack of punctuation and capitalization that goes on, you know, the basic fourth grade grammatical issues. So one can imagine how easily put off i may get towards people who refuse to type 'a' and 'e' around their precious r key. See now, when instant messaging became truly popular (at least in my opinion for whatever that's worth), was about the time i hooked up my first 56k modem and logged onto aol when i was 11 or 12. The first time i saw the acronym 'lol' even i was subject to its genial convenience. But as i grew older and developed a genuine appreciation for language in general, i became put off by such things. If the internet is the future of communications (which seems to be the undeniable truth of popularity) then I'm going to make damn sure that the English language doesn't get destroyed during the transition.

The use of 'text speech' ANYWHERE drives me up teh wall! Even when I'm sending a text message on my cell phone, I still spell words out in full. I guess as a semi-professional author I like the Engish language too much to want to butcher it! I expect to see proper sentences, and no abbreviations of words other than things like 'OK' and Internet specific things like 'LOL'. I moderate a web site in the UK and we actually have a rule that bans the use of text speech and excess abbreviations on the site, precisely because it does limit the readability of messages.

I have to admit when I am typing a quick text sms on my phone I use a bit of the annoying lazy text habits you mention, but I don't use them when writing or typing on a computer. I don't use it if I send an sms to certain people(my nanna) because she was a teacher and is always complaining about how it doesn't help kids learn proper english. I agree with her there I probably wouldn't understand some of the messages kids these days send to each other. The most I do is shorten a word or but 4 instead of four. But they seem to have this weird code that only they must understand. I notice they seem to write like this to which I find weird. I definetly give up reading any futher out of frustration.