The Impact of Social Media on; Grammar and Puncuation

Following on from my last blog, and continuing the theme of how social media applications impact the way which young people interact, I will be discussing the impacts upon grammar and punctuation, by social media.

It can be seen that using instant messaging everyday has caused us to develop lazy vocabularies. This is due to language which is used throughout text such as slang, abbreviations and informal talk, between friends. It can be seen that due to performing textual communication such as these on day-to-day basis’s, it has caused our language capabilities to deteriorate and weaken throughout their usage. This is due to talking in these ways being our most regular way of writing word-based pieces, therefore, it seems normal to talk informally, when we should maybe really be talking formally. This could cause us grief throughout publishing pieces of text or contacting people who we don’t know on an informal basis, such as employers.

By contacting people who we don’t know, incorrectly, it could result in us as individuals to get into trouble or miss out on opportunities, due to having a poor knowledge on how to communicate with different people, in different ways. It is important that we have the ability to know how to recognise how to talk to certain people who we do and do not know.

However, by using messenger services and social media sites on day-to-day basis’s, it could also mean that we are improving our abilities within grammar and punctuation. This could be due to the fact that every day we are consuming and out-putting large quantities of textual based information. Therefore, by consuming so much text as well as out-putting, from young ages, it is likely that we are going to pick up on the appropriate ways to spell and use grammar from a young age.

However, it can also be seen that using social media application messengers such as whatsapp and facebook chat, can weaken our grammar such as spelling. By relying on tools such as “auto-correct” to ensure we are spelling things appropriately, it could cause us to have a poor understanding of the English language, or, whatever language you speak. This could prove to be a problem throughout the future as it could potentially cause the ability of languages to deteriorate.

Therefore, we can see that the younger generations, are extremely under the influence of social media in concern with their grammar and punctuation. However, we can also see that there could be two arguments for this as social media could provide benefits for grammar.

Type again soon, Anna