I spent some time googling to see if I could find the whole essay--no luck--though interestingly the story has even been picked up by some foreign language news sources. I'd like to see how well the student was able to maintain IM speak throughout the whole essay.

I also wonder if IM speak would qualify as a true "language" with its own grammar, in the way African American English Vernacular is now widely accepted among linguists.

To me IM speak seems more like an English shorthand than a new language. It doesn't appear to have its own grammar, and when spoken, it's fully grammatical British English.

"It doesn't appear to have its own grammar, and when spoken, it's fully grammatical British English."

Granted. It's not a Grammar A, but it is a Grammar B.

I'm not sure I'm grasping the distinction between Grammar A and Grammar B--I couldn't really follow the narrative on the link you provided.

I was making more of a Chomskian distinction between descriptive and prescriptive grammar, pointing out that on a descriptive level, IM speak is not distinct from British English. It is only at the [linguistically irrelevant] prescriptive level that there is a difference. Perhaps the same distinction applies to Grammar A and Grammar B.

Here are some rather loose notes that I have on Winston Weathers:

Weathers, Winston.

Okay, now I see it.

I wonder if what resonates about this student essay is that it's not really following the Grammar B of IM speak--because it attempts a sustained narrative, it's being used in a rhetorical situation that is foreign to it. The result is a "hybrid" form that uses the style of a theme paper, but the vocabulary of IM speak.

Maybe one way to think about it is that IM speak makes paradigmatic substitutions rather than syntagmatic alterations in the original grammar. Im speak may replace word with symbols, but it doesn't, for the most part, seem to change the relationship between those symbols.