[xomanadaxo]

I've never seen anyone use text-speak in formal papers, but the quality of my peers' writing concerns me nonetheless. Yesterday I read someone's paper who, in addition to adding completely arbitrary commas in the middle of sentences, spelled "adolescence" as "adolescents" or "adolescens" through the whole paper. It was horrifying. However, errors like that don't scare me nearly as much as the "conversational" tone of writing so many people gravitate toward. Personally, I can't imagine turning in a paper that had sentences like:
"Vince Vaughn is not of the normal appearance for the average human being. He is an actor at an extraordinary height of six foot five inches tall. He is also muscularly built like he can almost be built like a football player. This is greatly portrayed through his character Jeremy throughout the entire movie. In general, a man of his stature says too many people: you look like someone who could punch me and knock me down in that one punch."
Now, I recognize that not everyone is comfortable writing in a formal tone all the time, but for academic writing (the quote above was taken from a friend's 200-level communication term paper) a conversational tone is never acceptable!
I know I'm starting to look at my own generation from a curmudgeonly "Hey you kids, get off my front lawn" perspective at the tender age of nineteen, but stuff like this drives me crazy!!
/rant