I present a study of the use of reduced forms by students studying on a web-based MA programme. By reduced form, I mean that word-forms have been reduced in some way, for example in clipped forms like plane instead of airplane; but also the formality level can be reduced, for example with more phonetic spellings like woz instead of was. White (2011, forthcoming ) demonstrates that these learners who are novice Internet users in English reduced word forms because of their saliency in discourse and frequency of use. In this new study, I look at the development of reduced forms over an introductory course in English linguistics, seeing if particular forms have become standardised, see Žegarac (1998) for discussion of this term. What the standardisation process does is argued by White (forthcoming) to mark that a discourse community has formed. Thus, by using reduced forms, students are marking that they belong to a community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991, Wenger 1998). We look at two types of examples. One are topic-specific items where there is a process of agreement among participants on a particular reduced form within a particular type of discourse. These are in fact a very local process of the kind argued to be central to the formation of communities of practice (Wenger 1998), and indeed can be local to particular topics, as the same reduced form can be related to different full forms (D referring to derivation in a discussion of morphology, or to the name of an individual Damian in a discussion of language and gender). Then there are more general items that are used in a wider range of topics and discourses. All these items can be subject to standardisation, we argue, although some items require a longer time to be standardised than is available during the short course analysed here. Very common discourse markers like please and thanks have been subject to standardisation, while less common ones like question have not, with competing forms still available.