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.  http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/XD.gif" alt=":XD:" title="XD" class="smiley" /> (I'll delete it after I've finished [Wednesday] to stop it clogging up the forum)

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.

[Simon]

Needs definition of "positive effect on language". Accordance of written/spoken text with the given rules of standard English? Then, is the average quality of all text/speech produced as a whole of interest, or is it the average language ability of people, independent of how much they write? About the former, I don't know, but the latter should increase for sure.

The internet is merely a means of communication and expression of culture.

Also, you can buy Elements of Style from online shops. :]

-- Simon

[Gronkling]

Needs definition of "positive effect on language". Accordance of written/spoken text with the given rules of standard English? Then, is the average quality of all text/speech produced as a whole of interest, or is it the average language ability of people, independent of how much they write? About the former, I don't know, but the latter should increase for sure.

The internet is merely a means of communication and expression of culture.

The average language ability of people (i.e How a person speaks/writes) and by the internet I mean exposure to acronyms such as 'U','lol',etc., people such as grammar nazis, slang such as troll and things that happen a lot on the internet like that. Probably should of clarified that a bit better in the original post.  http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/smiley.gif" alt=":)" title="Smiley" class="smiley" />

[LemSteven]

I said that the Internet overall probably has a negative effect on people's use of the English language.  Prior to the Internet, if you wanted to read the news, you had to get a newspaper or magazine.  Similarly, if you wanted to research something, you needed a book or an encyclopedia.  All of these older media are copy-edited before they are published, which removes most grammatical mistakes.

With the Internet, anyone can post anything online for everyone to read, and much less of what is posted online is properly copy-edited.  The result is that a greater percentage of the material that we read is informal and is therefore littered with grammatical errors, colloquialisms, and shorthand.  For a person like me who does a lot of formal writing and knows how to use proper grammar when necessary this is okay, but there are many people out there whose knowledge of grammar is only as good as the material that they read.

[mobius]

I think positive because like you said there's the "Lol tru dat bitch" spearkers as well as the grammar nazis and you can meet both and all kinds of people on the internet. In general it exposes you to a lot more knowledge easily or maybe quickly is a better word.
I like learning about how other people speak.

Somewhere in this video I think they talk about this sort of thing. (If not, one of the lectures by this professor he talks about it somewhere, but briefly. Even if you can't find it these lectures are really interesting. (To me anyway...)
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-868j-the-society-of-mind-spring-2007/audio-lectures/lecture-9/" class="bbc_link" target="_blank">http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-868j-the-society-of-mind-spring-2007/audio-lectures/lecture-9/

I said that the Internet overall probably has a negative effect on people's use of the English language.  Prior to the Internet, if you wanted to read the news, you had to get a newspaper or magazine.  Similarly, if you wanted to research something, you needed a book or an encyclopedia.  All of these older media are copy-edited before they are published, which removes most grammatical mistakes.

With the Internet, anyone can post anything online for everyone to read, and much less of what is posted online is properly copy-edited.  The result is that a greater percentage of the material that we read is informal and is therefore littered with grammatical errors, colloquialisms, and shorthand.  For a person like me who does a lot of formal writing and knows how to use proper grammar when necessary this is okay, but there are many people out there whose knowledge of grammar is only as good as the material that they read.

You have some good points. However, I disagree because of a few things;
First of all when Wikipedia first came out all the teachers (I guess a lot still do) said "this is terrible... an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, it goes without saying that it's useless. Any moron can put a total lie up and it'll be recognized as truth.

But theoretically if the admins of a site like Wiki are large in number and variety and diligent this type of encyclopedia could be much, much more accurate and effective than a book. First of all a book is written by a small group of people who claim to be knowledgeable in some area of expertise. But they could be wrong. And once the book is printed, that's it. The internet can be edited over and over again, as it needs to be and should. And you have experts from basically around the whole world to verify knowledge much better imo.

But back on the subject of grammar, I never liked strict grammar in the first place. For one thing anybody can say something that isn't a sentence like this:
"Where's my phone?"
"On the table." <<that's not a complete sentence but you understood what I said just fine.

I'm not so sure about other languages but English has a crap load of problems.

They're
There
Their

Do I really need to explain? Who invented this crap? Who said 'yeah those three words are fine, they're not confusing at all let's stick with them. Foreign speakers won't have any trouble learned our language. Or how about silent "e" or the I before E except that rule doesn't always hold either? "comb", "déjà-vu" < that's not even really English!!.
I should say that the main reason I don't  feel obliged to use correct grammar is because of all these ridiculous twisted rules. Not much in English is very rational. When learning the language, you can't "sound-it-out" like they said in Elementary. You can't  expect anything.

Japan has two characters that change under circumstances. German has something too I forget what it is, but from what I've seen English is one of the worst. Why did it become the most spoken language ever? (rhetorical question) http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/XD.gif" alt=":XD:" title="XD" class="smiley" />

Japanese has a lot of neat things, one is; KA at the end of a sentence makes it a question. think how useful that is. You can just add ka at the end of any sentence and make it a question. Can't do that in English.
[end of rant]

[Simon]

Anybody who knows correct English isn't impaired by u 2 lolzorz.

For others, it's highly unlikely to pick this up with an understanding that this is proper language. Even if they begin to use it themselves, their language ability hasn't shrunk -- there has never been any sizable ability to begin with.

The ability to express yourself in English can only grow. There's a ton of subtleties that one hasn't encountered even while taking English as a foreign language for 6 years. The proportion of badly written text altogether may be larger than without online communication, but it's confirmed that this wasn't asked.

About the internet replacing copy-edited sources of information: This is the best counter-argument so far, but are the contemporary sources really as bad as u 2 lolzors? You can probably only get that low if you just read other Englishly-challenged people's reactions to news.

-- Simon

[ccexplore]

Ultimately it depends greatly on how one uses the Internet.  After all, it's not like Wikipedia is filled with "u 2 lolzorz".  LemSteven made the point that the Internet certainly makes it easier for one to get exposed to "bad" English, but I still imagine it's not that hard to steer oneself away from sources of bad English and towards sources of good English.  After all the Internet is vast and you can often get the same information from multiple sources.

[Simon]

Eagerly awaiting results or updates from the research project :]

-- Simon

[Gronkling]

Here are two graphs. (This is part of a bigger project by the way)
http://i.imgur.com/B5OUD.png" alt="" class="bbc_img" />
I recorded data from two forums, this one and serebii.net (Younger average age) and the results are quite suprising.

[Clam]

Serebii poll is out of 32 people. (Yes, I went and found it http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/tongue.gif" alt=":P" title="Tongue" class="smiley" /> There are some good comments over there too)

I voted positive, for similar reasons to mobius. It makes you think about how language can be used, and how to communicate. That 'thinking' is exactly what we're doing in this topic http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/smiley.gif" alt=":)" title="Smiley" class="smiley" />

[Simon]

http://www.serebiiforums.com/showthread.php?589561-A-poll-for-data-for-a-school-assignment" class="bbc_link" target="_blank">Same poll on serebiiforums.com

-- Simon