I’ve been looking for a quote to demonstrate my opinion of most people using MSN/AIM. ESR has it:

Being a native English-speaker does not guarantee that you have language skills good enough to function as a hacker. If your writing is semi-literate, ungrammatical, and riddled with misspellings, many hackers (including myself) will tend to ignore you. While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we’ve generally found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for sloppy thinkers. If you can’t yet write competently, learn to.

I think that I shall agree with that. The Internet in general seems to remove people from the concept of spelling correctly. My main complaint is people using the letter “u” instead of the word “you”. This is unavoidable on chat, however, it doesn’t stop me from hating it any more. Instead of the writing being easy to read through, disseminate and understand, one has to decipher the meaning of multiple abbreviations and other such stuff. And it’s thoroughly annoying.

There are multiple benefits about taking the time to write full words: You look like less of an idiot, you’re more likely to think about what you’re trying to get across, and people will probably take more time to understand what you’re trying to talk about.

Not a bad trade off for two letters, eh?

</RANT>