Department of english language and literature course paper

CONCLUSION
An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or group of words. Depending on the abbreviation, it may be written in capital or small letters and with or without one or more periods. There are a lot of miscellaneous abbreviations in English.

Abbreviation is a reduced version of a word, phrase, or sentence. Abbreviations are societal slangs. They come and go in waves. The reason for abbreviations is linguistic economy. Communicators value succinct language, and abbreviations contribute to concise style. Technological constraints contribute to the use of abbreviations. They also help to convey “a sense of social identity; to use an abbreviated form is to be ‘in the know’—a part of the social group to which the abbreviation belongs” (Crystal, 2005, p.120). Those who are computer savvy will be recognized by their extensive use of abbreviations such as WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get), and other similar abbreviations.

Now abbreviations are part netspeak and textspeak, which is a rapidly emerging jargon used among Internet users. David Crystal has compiled a glossary of netspeak and textspeak, and some examples illustrated here are borrowed from the Glossary: bps (bits per second), four-oh-four [404] (a term identifying an error message shown on screen when a browser makes a faulty request to a server), and others (Crystal, 2004). There are a lot of abbreviations used by “species of spoken shorthand” (Crystal, 2004, p.120): OK (all correct), PDQ (pretty damn quick), GTT (gone to Texas), BTW(by the way), ETA (estimated time of arrival), FYI(for your information), POS (parent over shoulder), ROFL (rolling on the floor laughing), RSVP(Répondez s'il vous plait), BRB (Be right back), TTYL(Talk to you later), and others.