In keeping with the community's encouragement of carefully worded questions, I wonder if Stack Overflow could pop up a advisory box with writing tips when certain phrases are detected? My purpose in suggesting it is that a useful, highly indexable Q&A will be improved if it is written with reasonably clear and professional English; it might reduce a proportion of the edit workload too.

To start with, I propose that it would do so for any text-speak phrases that don't give rise to many false positives, such as:

* [Kinda](https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=kinda) ~ 17K instances
* [Wanna](https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=wanna) ~ 16K instances
* [Gonna](https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=gonna) ~ 10K instances
* [Thx](https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=thx) ~ 15K instances
* [Pls help](https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%22pls+help%22) ~ 2.6K instances
* [Coz](https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=coz) ~ 2.3K instances
* [Bcoz](https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=bcoz) ~ 500 instances

Also, I'd include the scanning of non-code sentences entirely in lower-case, plus various cases of [query overuse](https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%22%3F%3F%3F%22) (12K) and [exclamation overuse](https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%22!!!%22) (6K).

Some phrases cannot easily be detected reliably, so we'd have to leave out "pls", "wat" and "nt" used as abbreviations (thankfully I don't see those as often). The misspelled phrase " im " throws far too many false positives, though it can certainly be paired reliably, such as [Im trying](https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%22im+trying%22) (16K instances), [im doing](https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%22im+doing%22) (3K) and [im new](https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%22im+new%22) (2.5K).

This has been [suggested before, specifically for the phrase "it doesn't work"](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/91040/auto-smell-the-phrase-it-doesnt-work-and-ask-user-if-enough-info-given). I agree that this phrase *can* be unhelpful; however, its misuse is hard to detect, since its appearance in a question does not also mean that further details have been omitted.

Personally, I'd leave out "AFAIK", "AFAICT", "FWIW" and so forth, since I think these are useful and not automatically a sign of a poor post. I appreciate that the distinction might, nevertheless, be seen as rather arbitrary - comments on those welcome. (Edit: some users [consider these poor as well](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/94978/can-people-please-spell-out-their-slang-acronyms)).

I'd be inclined to make this feature advisory rather than mandatory, so as to *guide* users rather than to harangue them. In fact, as long as the rest of a post is well written, an occasional abbreviated phrase can add some colour - at least [it seems popular here](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=gonna). (Agreed, the rules for Meta are rather different, but still).

I've tried [educating serial offenders](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/165504/can-a-literate-user-be-encouraged-to-stop-deliberate-writing-errors) about writing style in the past, with rather mixed results, so I wonder whether the 'neutral' voice of a computer might do a better job?

I've found that some txt-spk phrases form part of the low-quality post filter; however, [a request to auto-replace them](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/95133/plz-get-rid-of-plz) didn't attract much support (and, for what it's worth, I think an optional notice is a better solution).

Post script: I'd love to include [cant](https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=cant) (62K instances) and [wont](https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=wont) (33K) too, but that might be taking the principle too far `:)`. Yes, they're real words in their own right, but both are rather archaic, and quite unlikely to be used here. And some more apostrophe sins purely for edification: [whats](https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%22whats%22) at 26K and [couldnt](https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%22couldnt%22) way down at 4K.

Post post script: it'd be great to discourage [urgent](https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=urgent) as well, though there are several legitimate uses of that, so it'd be harder to implement.