Following the Rules, Avoiding the Policing: Orthographic Regulation, Lay Normativity, and Self-Prescriptivism in Everyday Writing

Orthography is at once among the most explicitly regulated and the most socially naturalized dimensions of language. Drawing on a metapragmatic discourse analysis of semi-structured interviews with 21 highly literate university students in Austria, this article shows that orthographic norms function as powerful social expectations shaping judgments of competence and credibility across academic, professional, interpersonal, and digital domains. Participants oriented to correctness as morally consequential while distancing themselves from overt prescriptivism. Many described strict self-regulation of their own writing alongside reluctance to correct others, citing the social and affective risks of public correction—an asymmetry conceptualized here as self-prescriptivism . Responses to an example of online correction further illustrate how orthographic shaming negotiates authority and participation in digital writing spaces.