Article Subject: Dr Dato’s series on online dating etiquette - Part 1 - English grammar

Dr. Dato’s Brief:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

You may think that shortening the words from ‘you’ to ‘u’ looks very techspeak and cool but you will be surprised to learn that other members in particular females are actually turned off by this lingo. Whereas these abbreviations are ok in the restricted world of SMS texting or twitter and understood, they are actually bad when you put this up on your dating profile.

There are some permissible words such as ‘lol’, ‘haha’ and other emoticon words used in the context of communicating. However, an intriguing word such as ‘hehe’ can have differing view points and can almost sound like one has an ulterior motive behind the saying.

Today, it is so easy to pass your words through spell checker and not only that, all the online services ie. email applications, wordpress, forms that you use has automatic built-in spell checkers. In case you were wandering that when you fill out a form, why some of your words appear with a red dotted line beneath it, it’s because the system has detected a word that it couldn’t recognize or mistyped. Use it to your advantage and then you can always go to google and type the word you are having difficulty with and google instantly brings back suggestions, so you can tell right away that you have misspelt your word or not.

When you are creating your profile, pay attention to the proper structuring of your sentences, grammar and spelling errors, they can stand out like a sore thumb. After all, you want to have all those males and females look over your profile and not do the disappearing act when you type your location as ‘Kantucky, USA’.

Also inject a good sense of humor into your profile and try to write in such a way to induce some amusement or laughter in the other person but not from your grammatical mistakes!

For more information on good writing style, please visit my previous post on “Dating online? Beware of grammar errors!“.

mistakes like this may look amusing but leaves a bad impression

Tags: dating etiquette, dating language, dating profile tips, dating writing tips

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 20th, 2011 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Online Dating Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.