My mission with this book is to map out what some of those patterns are, to examine why they fall into the patterns that they do, and to give you the tools to look at internet language and other cutting-edge linguistic innovation through the lens of a pattern-seeker.

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As with any period of tremendous disruption, the explosion of informal writing is changing the way we communicate. The norms that we worked out for books and newspapers don’t work so well for texts and chats and posts. Imagine how weird you’d think ordinary conversation was if you’d only ever seen scripted TV monologues! We have a sense, more or less, of how informal speech works. We have a long history of doing it, and it’s the primary thing that linguistics studies, much as literature and rhetoric study formal writing and formal speaking. But the combination of writing and informality has been neglected — and this quadrant is precisely where internet writing excels.