Spell It In Full – Josh Journal
A common complaint I keep receiving among a large circle of friends is how people type in abbreviations, rather than spell each word out.
Going through some people’s chat, it takes me longer to decipher what is written, than it would have taken to read it if had been spelled out in full.
When I got to secondary school, a few teachers were dictating our notes to us, rather than writing them out.
A lot of my classmates would write it down using abbreviations and code words.
I couldn’t do the same. I just was never comfortable writing “to” as 2, or “teacher” as “Tcher” or “Tcha”. For me, I needed to spell each word out.
There is also the fact that my handwriting was barely legible. (It has improved by a tiny bit over the years.)
I couldn’t afford to be unable to read whatever I had scribbled down.
All these years later, we mostly type on screens rather than writing in books.
The abbreviating spirit never left most people though. Instead, it has worsened.
People are spelling out a word with an equal amount of letter, yet going with the wrong option, all in the name of abbreviation.
How is “kk” a stand in for “ok”? For goodness sake it is just two letters. Plus “ok” is already an abbreviation for “okay”.
Why are you abbreviating an abbreviation?
In all these years, how I spell and type remain unchanged. I have noticed that most people I chat with often, also type spell in full.
Looking back now, I can remember a number of them used to send messages to me with words shortened.
My response meanwhile was always, unfailingly, fully spelt out. I don’t know if this influenced them consciously or unconsciously, but I know they eventually kept spelling their words out.
Funnily enough, when I look up their other chats, there is still a lot of abbreviations involved.
Maybe it’s communicable. Maybe our brain gets in sync and it reflects in our writing style. Or maybe my stubbornness and insistence prevailed.
Whatever the case, I am happy to read without getting a migraine from trying to figure out what a scrambled, unpronounceable collection of letters mean.
The worst of this cases is when it gets carried over into formal letters and documents.
If all of your colleagues, clients, and merchants were your peers, then that would be understandable.
Why are you writing a man that is five years from retirement, and spelling “tomorrow” as “2morrow”. Do you want to give him a brain aneurysm?
Spell words out so you don’t inadvertently deny yourself of opportunities, or fail to communicate, and get taken seriously.
Wilson Joshua is a Video Editor, Content Creator, and Creative Writer.
Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. @IJOSWIL
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