All Things Digital

Skip to main content.

SEARCH
Voices

Voices

The Voices Feed

from other Web sites

RT@gooseGrade: Twitterers Good At Spelling, Bad At Grammar. #whatwouldmomsay?

July 6, 2009
by Andy Jordan
Editor and Producer, Tech Diary, The Wall Street Journal

Andy Jordan

Twitter may encourage a culture of shorthand and 140-character thoughts, but it may also make Twitterers better spellers in the real world. That’s according to a new study that indicates that Twitter users are worse at grammar. Or is. Or Are. WhteVr.

The crowd-sourced editing site gooseGrade.com surveyed 100 random English speakers on Amazon’s (AMZN) Mechanical Turk website who identified themselves either as “users” or “non-users” of the microblogging site.

Study participants had to write 100 words about what they did that day and were graded for spelling, grammar and punctuation.

Twitter users made about 20 percent more grammar errors than did their non-Twitter counterparts. But Twitter users were only about half as likely to make spelling mistakes as those who didn’t tweet.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Tagged: Internet, Twitter, digital, frontpage, social networking, software, , , , , , , , , | permalink
« Previous Post
Next Post »

Featured Voices Posts

Featured Video

View All Jobs | Post a Job Job Listings

A sponsored service from SimplyHired

Voices Posts by Date

About Voices

This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."

We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.

The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.

That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.

So here is exactly what we do: Read more »

About the Site

Because the site is wholly owned by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, we aim to adhere to the journalistic standards of the best of the mainstream media. But, because it is run autonomously as a small online startup, we aim to exhibit the fresh thinking and nimbleness of the best of the new media. We want to be first, and sassy, but also well sourced and accurate. We will offer lots of opinion and analysis, but plenty of fact as well.

Read more »