Judgemental, yes

By the way, did I tell you that I was featured in a Baltimore Sun article about online dating? Long story about how it came to be, but you can read it here. (If you don't want to register with the Sun to read the story, try bugmenot.com for a pseudo-login.)

If you don't feel like reading the whole thing, the highlight of my appearance in the article is an excerpt of this obnoxious, super-tart statement I made to the reporter about how my dear friend Loren and I used to sit in the tiny office we shared at the crappy movie promotion agency, and judge potential dates based on whether they "gave good email."

When I was single, one of my friends & I used to read boys' emails to each other, and decide whether or not they were dateable simply by their writing ability. Boys who wrote like they talked were dateable; boys who wrote boring/stiff/formal emails were sketchy; gross spelling or punctuation errors were not tolerated ever. If he wrote like he talked, and he was funny? He WON. Judgemental, yes, but it was a solid correlation every single time.

Of course, this all predated the whole IM-speak phenomenon, but I can't imagine either of us even considering a boy who was too lazy to spell out entire words.

(Incidentally, mAc used to write me AMAZING emails. Now, of course, they're more like, "If you're stopping by the store on the way home, we need trash sacks.")