[sigh] Sometimes I wonder why I bother...  Jennifer, this one's for you.
 
We've discussed before about reading posts carefully and with an open
mind and not LOOKING for offense at every turn...
 
>... I read the post made by Roger and thought to myself, "how can you
>possibly tell a persons age from the way they type?" ...
 
When did I say you could?  If you will allow me to quote myself...
 
>But there are those who do this intentionally.  Particular among
>many younger people (not necessarily on the FML), it seems to be
>vogue to skip punctuation and capitalization altogether.  It is
 
This says neither ALL nor ONLY young people.  It says MANY, in other
words SOME.  How do you read this and and infer that I'm opening an
all-out attack on all young people?  The "particularly" (it's supposed
to be "particularly", not "particular" - see, I make mistakes too)
implies that the statement that follows is not exclusive.  In other
words, this applies to SOME older people as well.  I even stated that
I wasn't necessarily talking about FML members!
 
If you wanna compare...at 35, I'm not exactly doddering myself.  Nor are
you exactly a teenager at 26, which teens - and younger - I was primarily
referring to by "younger people".
 
Your reply post was well written, erudite, and well-punctuated.  It
contains the occasional typo, but so what?
 
So the question is, why do *you* count yourself among the group I'm
talking about?  Because based on your writing example here, *I* certainly
wasn't singling you out!
 
To answer your question, it is fairly easy to identify age and correlate
this with posting style when many of these posts contain buried somewhere
in them something like "...and im in high school and this is my first
ferret...", etc.  Again, don't miss that "many".  "Many" does not mean
"all".
 
BTW, I have no problem with abbreviations, emoticons, etc.  But yes,
"l33t 5p34k" does bug the hell out of me.
 
MY ORIGINAL POINT was this: if you're writing formally, mistakes in
spelling and grammar have a huge negative impact.  Otherwise, there is
a HUGE difference between the occasional typo and willingly, blatantly
discarding the rules of English punctuation and grammar.  We can forgive
the former, but the latter makes it very hard to even understand a post.
 
And please, once again, let's try not to read offense into every little
post when none is intended, hey?
[Posted in FML issue 4252]