Grammar, Spelling & Your Love Life
• Online Dating
Back when I was using the web to meet people to date, with the intention of finding the right person for more than dates I was surprised by how inarticulate most people who sent me an instant message or email were.
License plate ebonics a friend of mine called them.
Though “a/s/l?” told me everything I needed to know about someone. But little did they suspect that “how r u?” only appalled me.
E-mail is different; it sticks around to be read and reread, even printed out.
Did she use too many emoticons? Did he really have to write ROFL to show he was laughing? E-mail falls somewhere between a phone call and a letter, but it has rules and pitfalls all its own.
“Instant messaging is better because the interaction is in real time,” says Phil Maggio, who writes about Internet dating under the nom de plume Sebastian Chance and found his wife, a native of China, in an Internet chat room. “People reread their e-mails and use words they wouldn’t use normally.”
“If someone doesn’t spell ‘you’ out in an e-mail,” says Alexandra Robbins, author of “Conquering Your Quarterlife Crisis” (Perigee Books, 2004), “I assume the writer is in middle school. E-mail is today’s form of a postal letter.”
It’s a scary thought. How good you are at cyberspace communication could determine your future – at least as far as your love life is concerned.