Lindil, abbreviations are fine in your own personal writings or pretty much any medium other than a message forum, where almost the only things people have to judge your personality is your writing. If you're willing to take such shortcuts here, then you'd take them in any facet of your life.
Also, having such abbreviations breaks up the flow of the post and makes it much harder to read. And don't think I haven't noticed your own phonetic abbreviations and been annoyed by them; I tolerate them because there's nothing I can do about them.
However, for me, "[Whoever] is def my fav char, w/out a doubt." is infinitely more irksome and much harder to stay focused on (especially when the whole post is like that) than "[Whoever] is definitely my favorite character, without a doubt." The former shows sloppiness with the language and a lack of caring for your audience, while the latter shows that you not only care about what you write, but you care about the reader as well and want to make reading your post a worthwile experience.
Incidentally, that's what brackets are for: they are used to replace a word or phrase in a quote with the quoters own words rather than those of the quotee.
[ October 18, 2002: Message edited by: Susan Delgado ]
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"Man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all 'til we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?"
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