How Techspeak Can Hurt Your English Grammar Skills [Infographic]

If you spend a lot of time on text, Twitter, Skype chat or any other instant messaging service (who doesn’t these days?), you might find it easier to remember techspeak more than grammar rules. Techspeak is the way we ‘speak’ on those services. It includes all the SMS abbreviations, plus more, that we use all day long. For example, LOL, OMG, IMHO, TMI, FTW, but it goes further than that. We also shorten words like ‘see to c,’ and ‘to becomes 2.’ I could go on and on. The question is, has this hurt your grammar skills?

According to a study published in the New Media & Society journal by Drew Cingel and Shyam Sundar, doctoral students at Northwestern University, techspeak is handicapping students’ abilities to form strong language and grammar skills. In other words, students are much more likely to remember the techspeak shortcuts rather than the grammar skills they develop in school.

It’s clear that using these popular shortcuts hurts the grammar skills of children, but what about adults? Are we letting basic grammar rules slide in our blog posts? I hope not, but I know this will make me proofread my posts a little more carefully in the future just to be extra sure. This infographic called Does Texting Hurt Your Grammar by OnlineCollege.org goes into this topic in more detail.

Some people say that it’s important to text and write to your children without using these shortcuts so they won’t imitate your writing. If they have a reason to use capital letters, commas, apostrophes, and regular grammar, they might not forget it so easily. If you’d like to brush up on your English grammar skills, you can click over to 15 Grammar Goofs That Make You Look Silly or A Blogger’s Refresher Course In English Grammar. Good luck!