There’s been some news about how text-messaging argot has been getting into students’ term papers and other communications. Some of my daily work involves the processing and editing of information submitted by students and the public through e-mail or online forms, but I haven’t seen much text-ese. The puzzling trend that I’ve noticed recently is an increase in Inappropriate Capitalization. (As opposed to ALL CAPS, or the cRaZy CaPs you see on Myspace pages.) And it’s not just being done by students. Everyone seems to be doing it. Here are some typical examples:

Throughout the month of May, all donors are eligible to win a Free Barbecue Grill.

An ongoing study is examining Work and Home Environments and how they relate to Physiological Activity.

Something else I’ve seen is a generally increased sloppiness in how people fill out online forms — typos, missing information, erratic or skipped punctuation. That always happens to a degree, but it seems to me that it has increased over the last several years — as if everyone is in a tremendous hurry. But the inappropriate caps are something that require extra effort to type (and with less mindless passion involved than ALL CAPS), and I’m intrigued at how I encounter this more frequently, now that I stop to actually think about it.

In the past, I always found that most people would attempt to submit text that had the same look, tone and feel as something that had been edited. They may not have been concise writers, but they aspired to be. I don’t get that feeling any more. It’s as if people have become passive conduits for raw, uncontrolled information — it pours into them, and it gushes out of them the same way.

Just a small observation about words in the wild… to be filed with the other minor news about disappearing bees, dying bats and deformed frogs.