Friday, March 16, 2012

Text messaging etiquette

I realized tonight only a few boys can get away with using smiley faces and other emoticons when sending me text messages: my best friend from freshman year, Matthew; my best friend from sophomore year, Jeff; and the original best friend from what is now nearly FOUR years ago, Marcas.

As I pondered on my annoyance from receiving text messages with emoticons from a boy, I figured this was a good time to lay down the law as far as my text messaging preferences are concerned, whether it's males or females sending the messages.

1) Use proper grammar, spelling and punctuation at all costs. It kills me to have to take out an apostrophe in order to keep a message under 160 characters. It kills me to see people do it when there's no reason to as well.

2) Don't try to have legit conversations about important matters via tex messaging. With some people this works; I do it with a select few. For the most part, use texting to set things up and then either a) talk on the phone or b) talk in person.

3) If you insist on using emoticons/smileys, fine. Just limit yourself: use one per message. No funny business with a smiling one and then a winking one.

4) Try to respond as quickly as possible. Sometimes, just like with phone calls, message cannot be returned that quickly. However, if you respond to one message within mere minutes, it should not take half an hour to respond to the next.

5) On par with responding quickly, respond. Even if you can no longer actually help someone or they probably have had a question answered, it's just common courtesy to at least respond with, well, something.

That's pretty much it. I'm sure there are other things that bug me about text messaging but if people would/would not do each of these things accordingly, I think the world would be a little bit of a better place.

Last YouTube video I watched: Top 7 Tips for Life

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