[Maladict]

That seems to be a bogeyman that keeps coming up all the time. I remember about 1200 years ago... Nevermind. There has been some research linking Twitter to illiteracy. I just can't buy that, fellas, I don't know, can it be that simple? (I should probably say IDK). What do you say people, are these newfangled services killing your braincells?

Quote

Statistics released by two major Canadian universities suggest that social networking sites�particularly Twitter�may be behind a rise in illiteracy among postsecondary students in Canada. The University of Waterloo, in southern Ontario, decided to require all students to pass a basic English language exam prior to graduation, but a staggering 30 percent of these university students are failing the test. Only a couple of years ago�before the rise of Twitter and Facebook�this figure stood at below 25 percent. Some of the most common problems seen by university professors is the presence of emoticons in formal essays and letters, the incorrect abbreviation of words�such as �cuz� rather than �because��and frequent spelling or capitalization errors even in the case of the most common words

http://www.pureconte...content=Twitter

[Maladict]

Dear Guest,

I will give you the emoticons and I will raise you contractions: the use of "don't" instead of "do not" was considered symptomatic long before the first Twitterian tweeted, as I'm sure you are aware. I mean, does the Great Web CREATE idiots? I hardly think so. After all, it is colleges that are complaining. My question would be, why in blazes did no one in the school system notice?
And I have a very strong suspicion that "cuz" in essays is not the worst part about those essays.

[Dmblock]

Actually, Twitter makes us abbreviate words to be able to express our point of view in 140 allowable symbols. But, let us admit that most people, especially among youth, use abbreviations and slang not only for posting in Twitter but because it’s considered to be quite funky. We receive messages in this “chat-spoken language” in SMS, WEB-messengers and other internet resources; we hear it in dozens of songs and films and some people really like it. It strikes me, that is not right to blame Twitter for this poor language.
Probably. we should contact the other people face-to-face instead of e-mails and other programs via internet.
Possibly, we should send real postcards and letters, and maybe it will make us speak and read better.

[DimGenich]

I tend to agree with Dmblock, because the literacy problem is much bigger though it connected with modern communication via Internet and SMS.
It looks to me that Twitter could be a very powerful instrument for improving one's writing skills to brevity and clarity.
Check the tense/voice of the verbs

[kender]

Thanks to social networks we have a possibility to witness how the language is changing. Everyone is writing now, so much material for linguists. Wow! If you need to understand what a living language look and sound like, just go to the Internet. Probably, it has always been like this, but there was no so much record. The language has always been adapting for new realities and most likely straining for simplification without any Twitter and Facebook. I don't have any scientific proof though. =)

[Autevielle]

Sounds reasonable. As for scientific proof, well, I don't have any scientific proof that you might have read some of the Krynn books (I'm guessing Dragonlance) but that's still a valid assumption