Lol Fred, i use to work for GTE for a year, so i am pretty savvy with dial tone acronyms. We live in a world of texting now so shorthand is the norm. FWIW (for what its worth)lol.
What is appropriate for texting using two thumbs on a small keyboard is not appropriate for writing using a full sized key board where the speed is much higher and more efficient. It takes less than a second to capitalize "i" when referring to oneself and nearly the same amount of time typing "if remember correctly" as IIRC. Of course that all depends on your typing speed, which depends on practice, something one gains more of when they write in English. Some text type writing I see on this site is done by individuals that don't want to hit the keyboard buttons for punctuation, including periods at the ends of their poorly constructed sentences. Without periods at the ends of sentences and none capitalized first words in their intended next sentence it is very difficult to determine where one ends and the other begins. Combine that with the poorly constructed sentences and distinguishing what they are saying is sometimes a near impossibility.
When I first read "POTS" my first thoughts were, one something to do with archaeology as I was involved in archaeological site monitoring and protection and two, a medical symptom where a person's pulse increases quickly and dramatically when their position changes from horizontal to vertically. In that context each letter of the abbreviation corresponds with a word, but I've forgotten the three words. That does not matter as long as all the people involved in the communication have the same level of training. It would be inappropriate for me to use the term in a post here if describing the details of an incident I responded to as an EMT.
Then there are the misspellings. Why don't people install the spell check feature that will help flag and correct improperly spelled words on all website and forum communications?
I'm finding that within the last 3-4 years I have to work extraordinarily hard to understand or have to give up trying to read about 5-10% of all the posts on this site. Add in the abbreviations that don't have clear cut definitions and I'm skipping about 1 of 10, to 1 of 8, posts on this and other forums I follow regularly. Of greater concern is how people even get jobs if they cannot communicate correctly in writing.
It is not as if I don't make errors myself as approximately 10-15% of my posts have to be submitted without a close proof read when I have to walk away from the computer to do something else. I hit "submit" quickly, intending to come back and proof read and correct errors. Then the situation that pulled me from the computer that I thought would take 10 minutes takes 90, followed by a few more. By the time I get back to the computer the time limit on edits has expired and a bunch of common errors and clumsy sentence structure has to remain. Common errors include using there, their and they're in the wrong way. Another is the incorrect use of to, too and two.
Finally, I like this example of the difference punctuation makes:
A professor wrote the following sentence on the board and asked his class to punctuate it:
Woman without her man is nothing.
Half of the class punctuated the sentence in the following way:
Woman: without her, man is nothing.
The other half of the class responded with the following:
Woman, without her man, is nothing.
It's clear, from this example, that punctuation is very important indeed!
