II
Now I want to focus on the concept of “zone of social variation” in Sebba’s argument in order to show that his point of view can be contested by a different approach, as Deumert suggest (2014, p. 142).

According to Sebba, while considering writing as a social practice is almost easy to see, it is not the case with orthography. But it can be said that orthography is a social practice on the basis that users can adopt a set of conventions to write words. There seems to be a social practice where people makes ‘reasonably coherent and consistent choices’ within specific social and cultural contexts (p. 26).

In writing, convention means many things, for example, that there is a socially accepted version of spelling a word — the correct form –, and that there are optional, likely versions of the ‘same’ word, and forms that are not allowed at all. Be the case the word /sku:l/, which could be written as follow ‘on the existence of conventional sound-spelling correspondences’ (p. 31) :

1. <school> – correct or standard
2. <scool> – incorrect, but recognisable as an alternative
3. <skool> – incorrect, but recognisable as an alternative
4. <zguul> – incorrect, ‘seems odd or weird rather than subversive’.

The question is that, in orthography, convention moves from highly standardised versions of writing words to reasonable and sometimes extreme variations. As Sebbas demonstrate, convention is a strong force, to the extent that variation is constrained by it: ‘to be meaningful, the deviation from the norm still has to be close enough to the norm to be recognisable to other members of the language community’ (p. 32). That narrow space between the standard use and the unlicensed variation constitutes what Sebbas call the ‘zone of social meaning’.

However, from the more aesthetic, creative, playful point of view of Deumert (2014), variation in orthography is a quite different issue. In her research of CMC writing, she rejects the concept of medialect ‘as it suggests that we are dealing with a lect, that is, a variety that has fairly well-defined structures and norms’ (p. 130). Instead, she wants to look at ‘strategies for writing, not specific forms that are imitated and copied’ (p. 130).

‘Strategies for writing’ have to be understood in a broad sense, not limited to typography or spelling, but encompassing the whole visual aspect of writing. In CMC, the almost static ‘zone of social meaning’ then is transformed in a ‘digital expressive space’ where strategies like letter substitutions, rebus writing or phonetic spellings come along with other resources, as images, emoticons and symbols (for example ASCII).

All around the world young people involved in CMC is developing strategies to create new meanings through writing. Here, the poetic function of language is a breeding field. The poetic emerges when the words are not used to represent meaning or things, but rather when the signifiers (the linguistic form) are foregrounded. So, to say that ‘zguul is not a meaningful deviation from the spelling of school because it does not follow English orthographic principles’ is to misunderstand what young people is doing or is able to do with words. That is why Deumert asks:

‘(…) do respellings actually have to be principled? Can we not imagine a situation, a specific context, where zguul could become quite meaningful even though — or maybe precisely because — it defies the principles of English orthography? Writing online (…) is not about rules, but about strategies and the display of creativity’ (p. 142)

II
Now I want to focus on the concept of “zone of social variation” in Sebba’s argument in order to show that his point of view can be contested by a different approach, as Deumert suggest (2014, p. 142).

According to Sebba, while considering writing as a social practice is almost easy to see, it is not the case with orthography. But it can be said that orthography is a social practice on the basis that users can adopt a set of conventions to write words. There seems to be a social practice where people makes ‘reasonably coherent and consistent choices’ within specific social and cultural contexts (p. 26).

In writing, convention means many things, for example, that there is a socially accepted version of spelling a word — the correct form –, and that there are optional, likely versions of the ‘same’ word, and forms that are not allowed at all. Be the case the word /sku:l/, which could be written as follow ‘on the existence of conventional sound-spelling correspondences’ (p. 31) :

1. <school> – correct or standard
2. <scool> – incorrect, but recognisable as an alternative
3. <skool> – incorrect, but recognisable as an alternative
4. <zguul> – incorrect, ‘seems odd or weird rather than subversive’.

The question is that, in orthography, convention moves from highly standardised versions of writing words to reasonable and sometimes extreme variations. As Sebbas demonstrate, convention is a strong force, to the extent that variation is constrained by it: ‘to be meaningful, the deviation from the norm still has to be close enough to the norm to be recognisable to other members of the language community’ (p. 32). That narrow space between the standard use and the unlicensed variation constitutes what Sebbas call the ‘zone of social meaning’.

However, from the more aesthetic, creative, playful point of view of Deumert (2014), variation in orthography is a quite different issue. In her research of CMC writing, she rejects the concept of medialect ‘as it suggests that we are dealing with a lect, that is, a variety that has fairly well-defined structures and norms’ (p. 130). Instead, she wants to look at ‘strategies for writing, not specific forms that are imitated and copied’ (p. 130).

‘Strategies for writing’ have to be understood in a broad sense, not limited to typography or spelling, but encompassing the whole visual aspect of writing. In CMC, the almost static ‘zone of social meaning’ then is transformed in a ‘digital expressive space’ where strategies like letter substitutions, rebus writing or phonetic spellings come along with other resources, as images, emoticons and symbols (for example ASCII).

All around the world young people involved in CMC is developing strategies to create new meanings through writing. Here, the poetic function of language is a breeding field. The poetic emerges when the words are not used to represent meaning or things, but rather when the signifiers (the linguistic form) are foregrounded. So, to say that ‘zguul is not a meaningful deviation from the spelling of school because it does not follow English orthographic principles’ is to misunderstand what young people is doing or is able to do with words. That is why Deumert asks:

‘(…) do respellings actually have to be principled? Can we not imagine a situation, a specific context, where zguul could become quite meaningful even though — or maybe precisely because — it defies the principles of English orthography? Writing online (…) is not about rules, but about strategies and the display of creativity’ (p. 142)