Ode on a Grecian URL

1. can u plz stop writing like ths?

I suspect that it's rather a compliment that you write to me in the casual style of contemporary electronic correspondence--"Can U send me my grade," etc., neglecting conventional spelling and grammar and choosing not to proofread for typos. By so doing, perhaps you mean to say "I trust you as a friend, and convey my respect for you by writing in a language I feel to be particularly authentic."

The problem is that the message I'm receiving is something more like "I'm an idiot who scarcely understands how periods work, much less commas. If my essays are grammatical it is only because I follow Word's grammar correction advice."

A little-known fact: when you get your BA in English, they inject a bit of Stodgitude into your blood, and suddenly you start caring about how people use semicolons. By the time you get your MA, you know the history of the semicolon and care passionately about comma splices. Just think of orthographical rectitude as a disease I have and humor me. plz.

2. Lecture is for passing notes

I hope to heaven that none of you are the type to sit and whisper to one another throughout class. I'm delighted that you have friends in lecture, but for the last couple weeks I have somehow chosen seats immediately behind incessant whisperers. If it is insuperably difficult to pay attention in class, or if your witty observation is too great not to share at that exact moment, could you write it on a note and pass it to your friend? Not only do you allow those near you to listen to the lecture more easily, but you get to practice your writing skills!

(My favorite whispered comment this afternoon, after the two whisperers had been ignoring lecture for the preceding twenty minutes: "I have no idea what he's talking about. This class is so confusing!")

3. Monstrous Middlemarch

Samantha (301) sent in this beautiful Shelleyfication of Middlemarch (Book I, Chapter 4) that I just had to share:

The moment Dorothea left the room, I meditated on the severity with which I communicated my feelings about her most definitely misguided attraction to the old, decrepit figure of Casaubon. But someone needed to have warned her! I suppose it is in the nature of a woman, however, to miss such shockingly apparent signs that the man she desires is not her suitable match. It is not right for a woman of such fine upbringing and with such potential to devote herself to a stale wafer of a man, wasting his life away inside one dry book after another! It shall be a ghastly sight to see the glowing form of Dorothea contrasted by the bleakness Casaubon leaves everywhere in his wake.