A poll for data for a school assignment.

[Gronkling]

I need to collect some data for a school project, you just need to answer the question above truthfully. Sorry if this annoys anyone.

More thouroughly explained question (I hope):
Do you the average ability of a person's English (how they spell, use grammar, etc.) is affected positively or negatively through things on the internet such as acronyms
(U = you, lol, 4 = for, etc.), grammar Nazis, internet specific slang, memes and other such things.

[Rezzo]

I don't think it has either. Out of all the things it does affect, it has the smallest impact on the way people speak if you ask me. But what would I know, I'm not a sociologist.

[Rave]

Depends how you define it. The internet culture has changed over the past decade.

people just type out of sheer laziness now just to get their point across, by not capitalizing and using quick symbolic semantics. hell, even textual language has evolved in a sense.

What we knew back then is old and ancient, and we don't really have alot of new coming kids that come and post stuff like that anymore.

As for your study, i'm having a hard time figuring out what type of data set you're trying to get here.

I know you're asking about sensory responses towards typos and and purposeful mispellings such as the l33t language and all.

But there are different kinds and dialects that we're talking about here. so in all honesty, it really depends on what context we are dealing with here. cuz due to confirmation bias, we will tend to elicit certain responses from certain things, depending on how that person themselves perceive it upon that other individual and their own learned capacity.

[WaterTrainer121]

It gets out of hand when people can't draw the line between when to use chat-speak and when to spell out the entire word.

Some of my classmates in my AP Psych class used "4" and "2" in place of "for" and "to" in their essays. An AP class, for crying out loud...

[GrizzlyB]

Well, the internet hasn't really helped anything ever, so...

[YaDunGoofed]

The only reason I stopped typing idiotically was on a forum I went to a couple years ago, they would ban you if you typed like a retard. But then again, this was a site for people out of K-12. So, I do feel a negative perception on how open our society is to cutting out the English language to "save" us a minute from a complete thought.

[ParaChomp]

Ah, this brings back memories of when I was in elementary school and MSN Messager was all the rage. We would exchange e-mail addresses at school and chat online when we got home. A good chunk of the kids in my grade would include the typical Internet chat text in their assignments whether it would be a title page with "R U Ready 4 the new U?" or many errors in a book report, one thing was certain, their grades dropped due to some dumb choices. With MSN's popularity gone, I'm sure such is still present but I doubt it's as common as it used to be.

From my time as a teenager to now as an adult, this problem is still seen. Sure maybe it's no longer present in the form of abbreviated text but it is present as slang. Heck, of all forums to come to talk about such destroying the English, you've come to one with the franchise its centred around is doing just that. Competitive Pokémon is filled to the brim with slang terms like "Über" (Pokémon who are considered too powerful for typical battles thus are illegal in them), "sweepers" (fast Pokémon who can hit really hard), and "hax" (effects that occur due to chance).

Your favourite video game franchise is just the tip of the iceberg as it gets worse when we enter the domain consisted of fans of Japanese cartoons and comics. It's just horrid at times, there are so many slang terms and the fans refuse to drop it. Some of them don't call some series by their translated names such as When They Cry which many refer to as "Higurashi" (though I can partially understand due to it possibility gaining international popularity before it was distributed overseas). There are also people who call characters by their names when pronounced in Japanese even when it is present that the character's name is not that (such as Kululu from Sgt. Frog whose name's correct pronunciation even when the correct way to spell his name with Roman characters is present even within untranslated versions of the show). What's worse is how infuriated some of the fans get when you confuse the slang terms that mean Japanese cartoons and Japanese comics for a kind of style that can be seen in different Asian countries along with some American shows mimicking the style. Then there are the infinite amount of terms like "moé" (a genera dealing with youthful and innocent femininity), "shonen" (a demographic of comics intended for young to teen males), and "tsundere" (a female character who acts hostile towards another character but has a soft spot for them). Through the 7 years as a fan of the medium, I'm glad that my taste for it has almost completely depleted.

As for grammar Nazis? Well as one (though, I won't lie, I do sometimes miss the odd grammatical and/or spelling error), I think we give off a positive influence on the grammar of others and aren't a bad influence. Anyways, I hope this helps with your research and I wish you the best of luck.

[Profesco]

Negative. Text/chat-speak has been identified as a problem by multiple secondary level teachers.

You could expect, maybe, that having access to Google and spellcheck might create better spelling and grammar since anything one doesn't know can be looked up and corrected in a matter of seconds, but then again you might also expect that having those resources in place actually decreases the motivation for and/or reliance on one's own long-term memory. Pardon my cynicism, but I expect the second one.

[ParaChomp]

Interesting poll results in comparison to the comments...

[SugarFreeJazz]

HAM radio operators have been using these same kind of abbreviations before Tim Berners-Lee was even a zygote in his dad's ball-sack. Why are they suddenly considered negative when used now?

The internet has changed the way people communicate in many ways. Has communication become more difficult? Er, no. Has language become more difficult to use? Not that I'm aware of. Would I say the internet has had a good or bad effect on the English language? No, I can't say it has.

The fundamental purpose of language is to be a tool for communication. If communicating with one another hasn't become any more difficult prior to the use of the internet, I don't think the internet has had either a good or bad effect on it. Just an effect. Languages change. That's the nature of them.

[dinosaurus]

I think it negatively affects it. People have become lazy due to texting and typing and the likes, and some people butcher english to such an extent over the internet that I worry about how they talk/write in the real world.

There was this guy in my class in Grade 8 and I remember he spelled 'cat' as 'kat' one time, and pretty sure he would hand in assignments writing "u" instead of "you". I mean, if you actually carry that over from the internet into real life.. then you've got a problem there. Not just for the one kid but the whole english-speaking population.. I mean, how many people are just like him and write terribly?

Not to mention when you carry that over into the "real world" (as in the professional business career world).