[danpalmer]

Clarity in communication is undervalued. Things like punctuation are a great start, but we can go even further. Avoiding acronyms where possible is often good for this, particularly if you can build a culture where asking people to expand acronyms happens.

A tough side-effect of this I've seen though is the possibility of excluding some non-native English speakers, both in terms of making it harder for them to consume content because of it using a wider vocabulary, and making it harder for them to succeed (in things like interviews) because of higher communications standards.

I don't know where I fall on this, because it does allow for better communication, it just requires more from participants. In fact poor communicators would be excluded regardless of their native language.

[JoshuaDavid]

One convention I've found useful is to define any acronym, or even any word or phrase that's used in a nonstandard way, the first time it's used in a conversation. Additionally, acronyms frequently pick up additional meanings than those you get from the individual words that comprise them, so you probably should not just expand the acronym the first time you use it. Consider the acronym "DDL", as in "Data Definition Language". If you're not familiar with the term, you will be equally lost whether someone says "The prod DB is down because the third DDL migration of the release hung" or "The production database is down because the third Data Definition Language migration of the release hung". If you instead say "The prod DB is down because the third DDL migration (DDL migrations = schema changes like adding or removing columns or tables)", everyone who's worked with a database before knows what happened even if they don't necesssarily know exactly what DDL stands for.

Acronyms are nice when you've got a long, frequently used phrase, as long as everyone in the conversation knows what they mean. I think banning acronyms entirely would be eliminating all of the useful value from the practice of using acronyms, while not necessarily addressing the largest problem that the use of acronyms causes.

[bccdee]

the original article confuses clarity with formality

you can be perfectly clear in lowercase and with sparse punctuation

acronyms can be ambiguous, but to say then that we should all write formally is a huge leap

frankly anyone who can't write clearly like this is a poor writer

i also doubt it really excludes non-native speakers unless you're using a lot of slang/abbreviations

[swimfar]

I think the goal should not be to lower the standards for everyone, it should be to help bring people up to the basic standards.

The more often people write informally, the more difficult it is for non-native speakers to learn correct grammar. I almost always use full sentences and correct punctuation in all forms of communication. But I make sure to always write correctly when I'm communicating with non-native speakers. I am doing them a disservice, otherwise. And it's also frustrating to me when I'm learning a language and what I'm reading from native speakers is below even my capability.

Also, I think there's a difference between making mistakes in a foreign language, and being lazy or not caring. For example, capitalizing the first letter of a sentence or the word "I" is something that 99% of people know they should do. So that mistake is not usually due to lack of fluency in a language.