An offline equivalent to chat is barely even sensible, because the circumstances in which you’re able to have a real-time conversation with someone on a piece of paper but not able to see or speak to them are so limited. (Passing notes in class or during a meeting might be one exception, but even there you’re able to see the other person’s raised eyebrow or muffled giggle.) The chat format’s astonishing durability signals the true birth of a new form of communication. Chat is the perfect intersection of written and informal language. Let’s consider what we know about these formats. We can read faster than we can speak, and reading also lets us glance back and check something again, which means that writing naturally supports longer and more complex sentences: if you compare an essay and the transcript of a famous speech, the essay will have more subordinate clauses, while the speech will have more repetition. (If you’ve ever been forced to listen to a novice public speaker read an essay out loud, it’s not your fault you found it hard to follow.)