I would say that in reading David Wertheimer’s, 99.9% of Proper Grammar is Obsolete, that he is more sarcastic than he is serious in his statements on the site.
First off, he refers to it as being a “disease” and states “cures” for this disease at the end but in a smart-ass tone of voice.
He does go on saying that he obviously understands the shorthand terms when he every now and then in his site states such abbreviations such as “gtg” and so forth, but in turn says things that make it sound like people these days are just too ignorant or lazy to use proper grammar or spelling in writing.
He also talks about how writing in this fashion could possibly deter our future writers from writing grammatically correct pieces of work when called upon…or at least that what I got from it. Which makes sense though since our future intelligence may be based upon what they are learning now and all they’re seeing is informal styles of writing and incorrect ways of spelling words.
He does make the point that when learning English, one is taught, “…in the world of English, if you write your sentence correctly, it works. If you write it incorrectly, it fails. Languages don't merely encourage this, they demand it.” Wertheimer talks about how the laxity of writing like this has “encouraged readers and writers alike to develop bad habits of which they are largely unaware.” He refers to this writing once again as being “bad.”
In the last paragraph, he says “Develop sophisticated abbreviations like "nnihtgttb" ("not now I have to go to the bathroom").” I think this is a very sarcastic statement because I don’t think this abbreviation is sophisticated what so ever. How are people like me supposed to read things like “nnihtgttb” and know exactly what that means?! Yeah, I don’t think so. That’s not sophisticated…but yet instead is a very smart ass way of putting things, in my opinion.
David Wertheimer Online Reading
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