Is the usage of "am" without "I" allowed?

Question

For years, I got uncomfortable whenever I see non-question sentence/phrase begin with "am" instead of "I", such as:

"What are you doing?" "Am eating."

Or

#amwriting

The problem is, that last word (or hashtag) is written by a tweet account that focused on English writing.

@AdviceToWriters

Engrave this in your brain: EVERY WRITER GETS REJECTED. You will be no

different. JOHN SCALZI #amwriting #rejection #writerslife

Now I become a little bit confused. Does the standalone "am" usage without "I" is actually normal? Should I actually accept this and learn this as normal? Or do I need to always mark this as incorrect? If this is normal, when is the appropriate context to use this? I mean, rather than #amwriting hashtag, I think a more appropriate hashtag would be #iamwriting or #iamawriter. I mean, why sometimes people deliberately leave "I" on those phrases?

Answer 1

It is slang, and informal. There is no particular grammatical reason to leave out the ‘I’, and it is incorrect. The writer of the tweet is probably using #amwriting because it’s a common hashtag, and they want their post to be included in the hashtag’s ‘feed’, so that people browsing #amwriting on twitter can see their post. As to why the hashtag was first used without being grammatically correct, we can only speculate.

Hope that helps!