Twitter: Subverting the English language?

The negative effect of LOL-speak and fractured grammar

When I received an invitation from Mark Ragan to sign up for his Twitter feed, I probably would have ignored it had it not been for a word in his post script: “Tweet up.” As a public relations consultant, I see the value of Twitter for some businesses to build their brands (although I don’t recommend my physician clients use Twitter), but as a writer, I find the medium toxic to lucid writing, and I told him so. He invited me to write a column for Ragan.com about the issue.

There are growing signs that excessive use of direct messaging, especially Twitter, leads to an erosion of the English language. College professors are seeing LOL-speak, fractured grammar, informal acronyms and emoticons crop into college essays. Teachers are noticing more punctuation errors (especially apostrophe errors), spelling mistakes, and inconsistent capitalization usually found only in text messages and Twitter posts. More students are failing English exams due to a lack of basic grammar skills.