Transcripts of spontaneous e-chat conversations show quite clearly that some intrinsic characteristics of oral speech are also present in written communication via instant messaging software:
- loose structures rather than complete sentences,
- false starters,
- lexical repetitions,
- pause fillers,
- hesitation fillers and
- interactive fillers.
The following features are more or less unique to Internet speech:
- shortened forms (e.g., “btw”, “imho”, “lol”, “rofl”, etc.),
- absence of or incoherent use of punctuation marks,
- lack of capitalisation of initial words in sentences and of proper names.
There seem to be two reasons for that:
- lack of time for proper editing and hence omission of those elements that are not crucial for understanding;
- interactivity and simultaneity or overlapping of utterances (e.g. when utterances by both interlocutors appear on the screen simultaneously and require revision of previous/ongoing utterances).