When I was with Nible2, there were two major incidences which reminded me not to pick up this bad habit. We were having a collaboration to jointly develop a product with a company in USA. This was at least 4 years ago. One day, someone remarked that her email to USA were never answered. So, the matter was handed over to another manager. No reply either. The US engineers just ignored the email.
I wasn't the most popular guy back in Nible2, but eventually the problem ended up with me. I wrote to them, and I got a reply immediately. Strange. For doing a good job, I was rewarded with more work. For all future contact, I had to write to them. I suspected it had something to do with the way I wrote, but never thought too much about it.
Then came the second incident. I was in US and it was good to meet someone in person. The first thing that guy said to me is "Do your colleagues speak English?". He went on to complain about the lengthy emails that he could not understand. Alas, he binned it. He also said the email didn't look important - it was full of shorthand ala SMS-English.
To think about it, it is true. Why waste time to respond to something that looks like it is written by a Year 6 kid? This shows a lack of respect and worse still - makes the email look trivial. On top of that, don't assume everyone can understand the same SMS English.
It was an embarrassment for me to have such complains. Moral of the story - write properly. One subject, one predicate per sentence. Keep it simple. Follow grammatical rules. There is a spell check function in most software nowadays. Bad English simply isn't going to make the cut.
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