IM Outta Here

Take a look at this interesting article in the Washington Post from a couple of weeks ago about the way IM lingo is seeping into students' writing. The author of the article interviews several English teachers. Here's an excerpt worth thinking about:

Jeff Stanton, an associate professor in the school of information sciences at Syracuse University, said sometimes he is taken aback at how informal students have become in the way they communicate.

Stanton shared one of his favorite pieces of correspondence: "hi prof how are u culd u tell me my xm grade - tim."

"It bothers me at one level, but I try not to let it get under my skin," he said. "But I am concerned [students] won't be successful if they don't know how to communicate on a formal basis. The first time they send a goofy message to the boss, they're going to be out."

As a teacher, I have to say this bothers me on more than one level. My approach to teaching college writing is that students have to realize that the way you communicate in your everyday lives and the way you communicate in a professional or academic situation are often very different--so different that you really have to become bi-dialectal. You have to master Standard English in addition to the variety (or varieties) of English you're already fluent in.

This isn't to say that IM language and other nonstandard dialects of English are bad or wrong. One college professor interviewed in the article rightly calls the inventiveness of IM language "ingenious." But its ingenuity doesn't make any sense outside of the original medium. When you write in college, even when you write emails to your college professors, using IM language can give the impression that you either don't know how to spell words like "you" and "please" or don't care enough about your reader to think about what you're writing.

So when you're writing this semester, please remember that what's appropriate and clever in one writing situation may be foolish or even insulting in another.