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What would you do if you opened up a book to see nothing but chat speak? Personally, I would be terrified. The problem is that so many youths in America are learning chat speak at the expense of English and it is taking its toll on the language.

When I was in school, chat speak was a constant frustration for the teachers, as so many of my classmates inserted chat speak into their assignments. I would hear the teacher say to the class almost every day, "'Cuz' is not a word. 'U' is a letter. Please spell your words out, or you will be marked down." The reminders would become more heavily emphasized when it became time for essays and other papers. It was not only endlessly frustrating for the teachers to constantly need to remind students that they had learned English and to please use it, but frustrating for those of us who actually use the English language and were told over and over to do so! It is not the fault of teachers that so many students seem incomprehensive of written English; they teach students as well as they can. It is the students who use chat speak who believe for some misguided reason that it is appropriate when they're not texting their friends.

On a different note, it has completely warped the way that people communicate online. While we all know that the internet is nothing more than a tool at best and not every website needs to be serious (in fact, humorous websites are one of the best things about the internet, in my opinion), in places where serious discussion takes place, proper grammar and spelling is important for the purpose of clear communication. In fact, most worthwhile forums have a rule about using proper grammar and spelling - at least to the point that it's legible. However, it seems that the amount of people using chat speak online is an epidemic. It's an epidemic to the size that moderators of some forums are unable to enforce the grammar and spelling rules. If many people are unable to decipher what another person is saying and all that anyone has to understand are the typed words of one another, communication becomes skewed and confusing. While the internet is hardly the pinnacle of satisfactory language skills, this mutilation has even begun to inundate the writing world.

On many writing websites, I have come across writers who seem to entertain an aversion to the conventions of proper grammar. On this very site, I have come across articles in which writers have seemingly abandoned all rational use of commas, periods, apostrophes, and capitalization of important letters. If natively English-speaking people (in most cases, people who completely warp the language are native English speakers and writers) can forsake all conventions of the English language and bastardize it into something else, it is no longer English. For some people, English has become Chatlish or Textlish, and I fear that it has bled into the wonderful world of writing.

Chat speak is good for texting friends in an informal environment on the phone. However, if you have a full keyboard in front of you, please use English. Don't abuse it.

Learn more about this author, Cordelia Riordan.
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