New environments and new writing tools, in particular computational synchronic communication systems, like chats, elicit new abbreviation forms. In this dissertation we claim that, although abbreviations are always been used when manual task is tiring or when we write under time pressure, new media brings new issues to the phenomenon of words abbreviation. The paper presents an experiment with students for whom we gave a manuscript text, originally written with abbreviations, that we present in the plain form. Students are asked to rewrite the text, abbreviating it when they feel that it can be done. They are divided in two groups, one with no experience of writing at the Internet and the other composed of frequent users of chats, blogs and e-mail systems. The results show that this latter group abbreviates more frequently than the other one, and that the forms they use to abbreviate indicate some phonetically and visually based clues which can be used to formulate rules for decoding these new kinds of abbreviations. We also collect data from Internet corpora, specifically from a blog and a chat site, in order to confirm our results. The target language is the Brazilian Portuguese, and the rules are language oriented, although we are assuming that these rules can be adapted to at least occidental languages. Teachers are interviewed about the so called netspeak and they also filled a form where they expressed their points of view about this writing style. The analysis of their answers indicates some interesting discussions about the pedagogy of writing, our main interest in this research.