That unnecessary reply to Slimm’s post, remarking on how he uses too many exclamation points just got me thinking.

Communication and styles of communication are always so interesting to me. Everybody seems to say things in such different ways (which honestly gets a lot of people on tumblr in trouble with others).

This is quite obvious in speaking. We have differesnt langauges, accents, slang, and voice that just seem to make so many ways to say one thing.

Many people find styles of handwriting interesting as well. Cursive, print, slanting a certain way, writing huge, or just putting huge tails on your letters. They all mean something. And I know I wasn’t the only one of my friends who found handwriting analysis just plain fascinating.

Typing seems to take away a lot of the personalization, but I don’t think it really does…

When I was a kid in school, many times I would forget to put my name on my paper. Many did this. So they teacher would usually pick out the anonymous assignments and ask people to check and make sure they weren’t theirs.

I learned quickly that when the teacher called out that it was a “boy’s handwriting”, I had to do a sort of walk of shame up to the front with them, because most likely it was mine.

To be honest, I’m glad today that I have a “boy’s handwriting”, but then it made me feel like so much more of an outsider.

My handwriting is messy and small. I mix my cursive and print. I’m more likely to scribble over or cross out mistakes than go back to erase. It’s all about writing fast before my ideas can escape my head.

My typing, funny enough, is very similar. I hit the enter key fast and break up sentences between posts. I save the end for a second enter as if I’m telling a joke and saving the punchline. My spelling is awful and I don’t take the time to go back and fix it if it looks funny (because honestly enough most words look like they are spelt wrong). And forget puncuation. That takes far too long to type.

If you have read chatlogs that my friends and I post, you probably notice it looks like I hate to capitalize my words. In chat, I rarely capitalize I or names. Places and organizations are more 50/50. The funny thing is, I’m more likely to capitalize character names if they belong to someone else, even in mosts where I and my own characters were left with all lower case.

But wait (you may say), you aren’t typing like that right now. No. I’m not. But I don’t always speak with the same voice either.

I have been made aware of my four main styles of speaking. That is default. I also have excited, pissed off, and what my father refers to as my “teaching voice” though I’m pretty sure I use it whenever trying to sound professional.

And all have different styles of speaking, handwriting, and typing when I get into each mode. I won’t bog you down with details, but they all seem to follow the same rules thoughout the styles of communication.

What’s funny is how typing styles show in Maggotry’s chat.

Even if we all would change handles (assuming we weren’t mimicking style of type as well), we could probably tell who is who based upon just how we were typing. (Though, conversation would help as well as in who is talking about poop and who is telling them to shut up).

So what does this mean? Am I saying that grammar Nazis are pointless and style is more important? No.

As I feel with basics in art, I think a good basis of grammar is important for type.

If people can’t read what you are typing… If people can’t figure out your handwriting… If people can’t tell what the hell you are saying… you need to fix that. Learn to type. The point of it all is communication.

If people can understand you through your mistakes (on something that isn’t professional of course), you are okay. It’s your style of type. It’s your exclamation points. It’s your teeny, tiny fragments of posts. And that’s cool.