Before reading the article, “We Learned to Write the Way We Speak” by Gretchen McCulloch, I never had much awareness of how much digital tools and platforms have impacted the ways I write and communicate with my friends and family. Writing informally has become second nature when communicating digitally. Compared to communicating with others in person, there are obvious restrictions when it comes to communicating over the internet. To overcome those restrictions, we’ve learned to write informally in a variety of ways that allow us to communicate our emotions or the tone of our voices. Simply by changing the capitalization of a letter or lengthening a word with extra letters, “a listener can infer gloriously complex sentiments like humor or irony or reluctance or passive aggression.”

Based on the audience, there is definitely a change in the way you communicate as a digital writer. When I would email a professor or an employer, I write formally with proper grammar and well complete. However, when communicating with friends and family, writing formally isn’t necessary, so I don’t bother with fixing my grammar and write using different slang.

When I communicate through digital technology, I personally don’t finish my sentences with the correct punctuation because it doesn’t seem to be necessary when talking to a friend. It is usually clear whether or not the message is a statement or question. I also tend to extend words by adding extra letters to the end of them because it helps me convey an expression to a greater extent. Growing up, I was more likely to communicate with others through texting, but more recently I began to prefer communicating through audio calls. Audio calls allow me to feel more connected with my friends and family compared to messaging.