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Comment by salgernon | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I was wondering about that just yesterday. It seems to be common among realtors and mortgage company underlings - people that I don't normally have to deal with, but that are likely to use emoticons to end every paragraph.

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I do deal with realtors every day... my god, never in my life have I met such an illiterate group of so-called professionals.

It isn't fair to call them illiterate any more than it would be illiterate for me to not understand all the intricacies of real estate law. At some point, we as technologists gave them this communications tool without actually engaging with them in its proper use, and they learned the lowest common denominator etiquette.

When my teenage kids text me, I make sure that they use complete sentences. I'm a bit of a bastard that way, but hopefully they'll be better off later on in life.

I think Kluny's point is the the emails were an incorrect use of the English language not an incorrect use of email.

It's one of the few potentially decent paying professions someone without a college degree can get into without insurmountable entry barriers, so perhaps you should go a bit easier on them.

College or not, anyone involved in deals involving hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars should not be writing emails that look like a text message written by a 12 year old. Perhaps I'm selecting the wrong measure of quality, but if a realtor were to send me an email punctuated by a plethora of smiley faces and three periods at the end of sentences, I would find another realtor. I say this based on experience, and the one that communicates with email that appears to be written by an adult turns out to be the one that doesn't annoy me by not listening and showing me houses I have no interest in.

I was just displeased as you were I'm sure to find out that a billionaire used smiley faces too

http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/53358dd4ecad04e75a8...

I'm not seeing "a plethora of smiley faces and three periods at the end of sentences" in that image... :)

"Thanks !! Eric" nearly sent me over the edge. Did he ever moonlight as a realtor?

It doesn't look to me like he's discriminating against realtors for not having gone to college; he's bashing them for actual demonstrated poor literacy, which is a lot harder to excuse than not going to college. (If you meant to instead make a more reasonable complaint about him painting with an overly-broad brush, you should have said so.)

Yes - I applaud them for being successful professionals without going to college, but college shouldn't be necessary for basic literacy.

Basic literacy is perfect grammar and spelling now?

I am a mortgage company underling and can confirm that almost everyone at my company, and the realtors we deal with, use tons of emoticons. I think it's the only way everyone manages to stay sane in this business.

I would not be able to stay sane if I had to look at tons of emoticons every day.

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