“OMG I want this schol soooooooobad! J/K, its all good!”
Now, I’m no curmudgeon. I understand that language, both written and spoken, is constantly changing and that it’s young people of every generation who drive a lot of that change. However, most of you realize that the style of communication you use for email, IM and text-messaging shouldn’t be the same style you use to communicate with scholarship judges in your application. The language and writing style you use don’t have to be stodgy or ultraconservative, but remember – this isn’t an email to your best friend, either.
Remember also, from a more practical standpoint, scholarship judges are often quite a bit older than you are, and therefore aren’t familiar with shorthand phrases like OMG or J/K and the 300 other ones that younger people use. Even if that style of writing were appropriate for a scholarship essay (and I repeat, it’s not!), the judges probably wouldn’t understand what the heck you were saying anyway.
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Josh,
You probably see this one often, as you’re reading essays, because it’s so easily done. You typed in “that” rather than “than” in a section of “Use proper punctuation”.
Though I have teenaged (and older-and younger) kids and do know a bit about facebook, etc., I think I have just dated myself here, as I had to google “j/k” to find out what it meant! 🙂 (Those same older kids will get a kick out of that fact!)