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In a world without e-mail, spelling counts.

You’d think being able to send messages almost instantaneously around the world between computer users would be good enough. Remember, there once was a time when a letter sent overseas was really sent over the seas. The envelope was sealed with wax and carried over the ocean on a sailboat. If after several months you still got no response, you had no idea why.

But no, e-mail is apparently too slow for people. So slow, in fact, that even typing them is burdensome. Pundits everywhere are screaming about how nobody writes carefully any more. Nobody thinks about what they’re going to say before they start typing. Writing is a lost art, they cry. Personally, I think it’s the editing process that’s disappeared. Either way, what’s here to stay is a written, stream-of-consciousness communication. It’s like talking, but on paper.

Remember, we don’t want written mail. We want talking.

So the first to go, obviously, is capital letters. Do we speak in capitals? Certainly not! Besides, there’s that whole Shift key rigmarole. See, typing uppercase characters requires two fingers on the keyboard at the same time. Ouch! Clearly this is inefficient. For the sake of greater speed, let’s avoid all capitalization.

And punctuation. We don’t really need punctuation either, do we? It’s pretty obvious where sentences end, right? Okay, so maybe we don’t use uppercase to begin our sentences, but we can always drop in some extra spaces, or a hyphen. That’ll work. Let’s quit using periods and commas, because they’re all such a terrible waste of time.

While we’re at it, let’s drop greetings and signatures, too. It’s obvious who the writers and readers are. We don’t need to open our messages with “Dear” and end them with our names. Assumptions are faster. And once we’ve dropped the openings and endings, we might as well cut out the middles, too. Let’s keep our messages to no more than one paragraph. Even better, I say we establish a two sentence maximum, and keep our sentences as short as possible. The ideal message might be, “Lunch would be great. See you Tuesday at 12.” Oh, right. No capitals and periods.

     lunch would be great
     see you tuesday at 12

But even this is too much, can’t you see? What’s with all the whole words? We have abbreviations and shortened versions galore, if we’re willing to use them. And when you don’t have a decent abbreviation in mind, just drop vowels. And verbs. And try to use phonetics and pictographs.

     lnch grt - C U tues @ 12

Oh, phooey. Still too long, don’t you think? We can cut 5 seconds from our typing time if we use smileys and drop all that extra whitespace.

     lnchJ-CU:Tz@12

Okay, now we’re talking.

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Copyright 2002 Seth Maislin

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