Omlet survey says men hate 'funky spelling' when texting

Flickr/Trevor Cummings

I am a writer.

So naturally I love words.

To this day I remember how excited I was as a child learning new words, big words, like encyclopedia. EN-CY-CL-OP-ED-IA, don’t you just love how it rolls off the tongue. Alas, this is probably why I have not conformed to the condensed version of the English language used when texting. No matter how many nanoseconds it takes, whether it is a text for my editor or a note for the family I must spell it out.

This is why I found a new national survey by Omlet (www.omlet.me), which is a chat app developed by a group of Stanford students interesting. The question they posed to 1,000 adults and young people participating was this, "If I holla at u w/flirty msge 4 possibull date, do u care ‘bout my cr8tive spellin?

According to Omlet’s Digital Flirting Rules survey – most men (58 percent) and women (73 percent) consider funky or very informal spelling to be their #1 biggest turn off, when receiving chat or text messages.

The second biggest turn off for the men in the survey was the use of multiple exclamation points in chat messages!!!! (47 percent disapproved). The men also frowned on a lack of punctuation and grammar (46 percent disapproved) followed closely by the use of all lower case words (41 percent disapproved). Almost as bad in their opinion was excessive slang as in LOL, BRB, WTF (40 percent disapproved).

The women in the survey were a little harder on the lack of punctuation and grammar. It was their second biggest turn off at 59 percent, followed by excessive slang (54 percent). One thing the men never mentioned but was a big turn off for the women was messages received during sleeping hours (51 percent disapproved). Fifth-biggest turn off for women was the use of all lower case (50 percent disapproved).

What both sexes did approve was the use of multiple emoticons and emojis, so keep those smileys and winks coming.