As you may or may not know, I am a Masters student at Murdoch University. It’s quite a respectable university too. It has a Law Faculty… and a Vet Science one, and up until today I presumed a certain level of literacy of its students. I shell out quite a lot of money for the privilege of studying there externally, as people may also appreciate.

My sole communication with the University is through WebCT and email, as well as through the occasional campus-wide email. The student paper, Metior, gets distributed via this, and up until now, it has had some ok information in it.

Imagine my surprise when I get an email from Metior that has fucking leet speak in it. And I am not talking about 1 or 2. I am talking about just about every sentence being littered with idiotic language shortcuts and too many exclamation points.

Now, it pisses me off on Whirlpool. It pisses me off on email lists, and it pisses me off anywhere else on the net. But I deal with it. I sigh, and move on, seeing it as a simple side effect of a larger number of retards getting AOL. But when official communication, via the university campus wide email network, had leet speak in it, I lost it. I wrote them the following email:

Just some constructive feedback from the Metior email today.

Might just be me, but I find the teenage “SKILLz” 1337 typing *really* annoying and unprofessional. Why are we paying thousands for our education when our reps cannot even type properly in their correspendence to us?

You should not assume that all Guild members are teenagers — and not everyone finds this typing amusing or cool. I find it insulting to my intelligence and a complete disrespect for the campus-wide email system. Completely inappropriate for University.

As a former student politican, I am worried at the low editorial standards that were displayed in this newsletter.

I hope you take this in the constructive manner it was intended and please use the campus-wide email system more formally from now on.

Regards

Téa Brennan

I’m sorry if I appear to be some old crank, but fucking hell. Something needs to be done to combat this tripe. It is even infiltrating Universities! Kids can’t even construct a sentence properly (you should see some of the shitty sentences on the WebCT board for a second /fourth year unit I am taking), they can’t even type properly when they have to. Its an effing disgrace.