>Twitter has popularized spelling abortions (u, r, 4, etc), dumbed-down vocabulary and hashtags over substance. I don't see how abbreviations or vocabulary cha

>Twitter has popularized spelling abortions (u, r, 4, etc), dumbed-down vocabulary and hashtags over substance. I don't see how abbreviations or vocabulary change the substance in any way. The only thing it changes is your mindset, and there is something to be said for adopting one's writing to this effect, but in essence: if you are swayed by someone's tone or style instead of substance then that speaks ill of you, not the speaker. edit: if you are going to be pedantic about other people's writing: `etc' should be followed by a full stop. ;) >Even worse is when this extreme brevity leads to entirely avoidable misunderstandings. This is a serious problem for discourse on twitter though, and people have already taken to working around the 140 character limit such as writing (1/4) and tweeting 4 times, or using twitlonger.