Poverty of written communication

Just read an article by Louis Menand in this week's New Yorker reviewing Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss.

Menand had a nice quote about written versus spoken language that might help us retain some perspective on the limits of communication in chat reference:

"Speech is somatic, a bodily function, and it is accompanied by physical inflections—tone of voice, winks, smiles, raised eyebrows, hand gestures—that are not reproducible in writing. Spoken language is repetitive, fragmentary, contradictory, limited in vocabulary, loaded down with space holders (“like,” “um,” “you know”)—all the things writing teachers tell students not to do. And yet people can generally make themselves understood right away. As a medium, writing is a million times weaker than speech. It’s a hieroglyph competing with a symphony."