(no subject)

Oh my god people. Punctuation is still important, even if it's the internet. Correction: it is more important because it is the internet. When text on a screen is the only method of communication you're using, without the pauses and intonations from speech and the supplements of body language, making your text as clear as possible ought to be a major priority. SO PLEASE USE YOUR PERIODS, K? AND EVEN SOME COMMAS AND SEMICOLONS IF YOU'RE FEELING WILD. I get that all punctuation other than periods tends to be viewed as a sort of advanced topic these days (or as I like to call it, Every English Teacher Will Have a Different Opinion About How Many Commas You Should Use), but give it a try. If you really want to go out on a limb, find yourself a secondhand style guide. The section on appropriate punctuation will be good long after the MLA formatting changes again.

I'm not saying that you must punctuate every line of every IM conversation perfectly, because I certainly don't. I'm just saying that you ought to make an effort to be comprehensible, and the human eye needs punctuation (and sometimes paragraph breaks) to read and comprehend effectively. That's one of the things that makes reading very old source material an absolute bitch--no capitals, no spaces, no punctuation. Let's not backslide to BCE standards.

/rant