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I have a chat friend. He is a very serious person at learning English and every time we chat, it is always to improve our English. He gave me some usefull links such as BBC or dictionary also links to download a podcasts. I bookmarked those links just in case I will need it one day. But to be honest, I almost never visit it twice :P Please keep it a secret, I don't want to hurt his feeling.

One day, he asked me if I chat with someone to improve my English, some teacher or some conference group because he, himself, is a learner in a Skype conference group for foreign learners of English. In that group, there's a chat room and a teacher that correct mistakes and offers reading lessons online. They also have rules. He gave me lists of the rules if I want to join the group so I am warned and can be prepare.

These are some of the rules they have.

1. Members must write English as best they can and correct their typos and their mistakes. Correcting your mistakes will help you to learn. Seeing uncorrected mistakes will cause other people to make the same mistakes.

2. Write correct English. No mobile text abbreviations like "CU"  for "see you" and no lazy typing like "i" instead of "I". "I" must always be a capital letter, even in the middle of a sentence.

These rules has woken me up. I agree with these rules. I agree that correcting your mistakes will help you to learn and I agree that seeing uncorrected mistakes will cause other people to make the same mistakes. That is so true. That is why I started to type in a correct way when I chat even though my grammar might not be correct.

I also stop using sms shortenings and type it correctly. No more lazy typing like "u" instead of "you" and "sth" instead of "something". No more "I" with small caps, no more "r" instead of "are". That is hard, real hard to get used to it and I am too lazy sometimes especially when the ambiance of chat room is great when you have to type very quickly to not miss a thing.

Well, these are some typings that I've noticed in the chat room:

* do u kno dat?

* u are rite

* i wanna learn more about english

So my friend, the message what I am trying to say here is try to type in English correctly because people will learn from what you have written and if you write it wrong, they will likely do the same thing. ;)

You might have a list of any words that people used to write in short. Please write it here and write how it should be written in a right way. In this way, you are helping others and myself to write in English properly. :)