Are you a writer? Do you enjoy sharing snippets of your life, your hopes and dreams, what you had for breakfast? Can you create a hearty monologue, that fills your readers with internal smiles and quiet nods?  

I can’t. I’m not a writer by any means, more of a babbler – verbose and ditzy.

That’s why I like the internet. Many an email that leaves my outbox is entirely lacking in punctuation. Many more lack capital letters and some lack actual words entirely. Well, I mean actual words that could be traced to a dictionary. Not the kind of actual words that are allowed in the NCEA.

Call me old fashioned, but I definitely don’t approve of examiners accommodating “txt language” in any form. See that? I’m so old fashioned I even put bunny ears around it. “Txt language” is great if you’re trying to track down your mates or having a D & M with your BFF. Cue current Telecom bunny advert. But it shouldn’t get you any points in an exam.  

I mean, in terms of future usefulness, probably only one person in New Zealand gets the job at Vodafone of making up those text message ads that they send you. And maybe one more at Telecom. So that’s a total of two jobs where the requirement is for fluency in “txt language”. I’d like to raise the possibility that we educate people for some of those other jobs out there. Because setting kids up for that kind of competition? Well, that’s just mean.

Right now it makes sense to use this easy internet language. Although my old fashioned-ness would decree that it’s not ok for work communications, only personal. I’m not sure that work colleagues would appreciate statements like “aloha just gonna have a leetle nap *yawns* okey dokey xx :)”, where the only punctuation is an asterisk, a colon, and half a bracket.

As long as you can decipher it, the lazy flow of words populates the page effortlessly and reads as casually as if you were speaking with the author. My own peculiar style of internet language is frequented with portmanteau a la Cute Overload. It’s an addiction that I can’t crack. And, not being a writer, you’ll have noticed that my grammar totally sucks and I’m pleading guilty to extreme overuse of the Oxford comma.

Maybe you‘re a writer? Maybe you’re a blogger? Hailing from my homeland of Taradise, artist Dale Copeland writes:

“A blog – it's a weird concept. Like leaving your diary on a high shelf in a dark corner of the biggest library you can imagine.”  

Kiwiology is one attempt to collect all those diaries together on the same shelf and put up a big sign. It’s still in a pretty dark corner of the biggest library you can imagine, but it creates a new way for us to find each other, and to connect. It exists especially for the writers and bloggers of New Zealand, as we find our voices somewhat lost within the roar of the international blogosphere.

Drop us a line and tell us about yours. We’d love to have your diary on our shelf.