1083: Writing Styles

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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I liked the idea, suggested by h00k on bash.org, of a Twitter bot that messages prominent politicians to tell them when they've unnecessarily used sms-speak abbreviations despite having plenty of characters left.

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I liked the idea, suggested by h00k on bash.org, of a Twitter bot that messages prominent politicians to tell them when they've unnecessarily used sms-speak abbreviations despite having plenty of characters left.

Explanation

This comic is less about how teenagers write on the internet and more about how politicians write on the internet. The comic shows that a lot of politicians, likely specifically alluding to US Senator Chuck Grassley, use "sms-speak", which involves substituting numbers for letters and shortening phrases to get a longer idea across in less characters. The practice began first with text messages, also known as SMS or Short Message Service which limited messages to 160 characters. Twitter has adopted the 140 character limit since its inception, which allowed any given tweet to be received as a text message with enough room for the user's Twitter handle (15 characters max).

The point of the comic is this, there is no reason for anyone, especially politicians, to use "sms-speak" in tweets unless they are reaching the 140 character limit.

Character Count

Neither example given exceeds 60 characters. Indeed, extending the "sms-speak" to logical full character words and punctuation only uses slightly more than half the character limit:

  • Ron Paul is the only candidate who offers us a real choice! (59 characters)
  • its gettin l8 so ill b here 4 prob 2 more hrs tops (50 characters)
  • It is getting late, so I will be here for probably two more hours, tops. (72 characters)