Net-Sp33k controversy

It's been two years since I began my job as a teaching assistant in the College of Communications. I had a student who I had nicknamed "Sleepyboy" who, in addition to living up to his moniker by sleeping during every class, had a habit of turning in major projects written entirely in Netspeak shorthand. It drove me nuts. To my way of thinking, by the time my students took my class, most had spent an entire year in college. Before that, they had taken (and made respectable scores) on a national standardized test, and even before that, they had performed well in high school. There was no excuse for being unable to utilize the English language.

I should admit that I'm undoubtedly a purist in this regard. My great-grandmother was an English teacher, and I grew up with grammar rules drilled into my memory. Our idea of a grammatical controversy was usually based around whether there should be a comma before the conjunction when three or more words were listed in a row.

Is there a place for Netspeak? Certainly, there undoubtably is. I won't argue the point that people writing in Netspeak is better than people not writing at all. But I have to admit, I have a hard time taking people seriously when I have to decode their sentences into English. It makes me feel as though I'm talking to a six-year old.

I've used slang and vernacular in my speech all my life, but it was always a clear-cut line that when it was time for school or professional writing, I had to use something more formal. If some teachers want to allow Netspeak in assignments completed for them, I have no problem with that; but is it justified for the teachers who choose to restrict writing to something more formal to be depicted as square because they want to enforce English grammar? (And really, isn't there a place for that?)