Deterioration of writing skills because of social media sites

Today if we are told to write on paper with pen we get confused. From recent years it’s been a regular complain from parents and teachers that the English language and grammar of their wards has deteriorated a lot, which is very well true. Initially lack of grammar training skills and appropriate efforts on the part of teachers were taken the basic reason. Later, many educationists toiled hard and researched all over the globe, for finding the actual reasons for the same and found that cell phone texting, social networking sites such as Facebook, whatsapp and Twitter, are all being blamed for an increasingly unacceptable number of post-secondary students who can’t write.
The research, conducted by Booked, a magazine for schools, found that half of Britain’s headmasters are concerned about their pupils’ approach to reading and writing. From a survey of 214 secondary school heads it was found that 70 per cent believed that Face book and Twitter are ‘bad for literacy’.
Excessive use of such sites means youngsters’ spelling and grammar has deteriorated. For example, some write ‘L8’ rather than ‘late’, ‘4U’ rather than ‘For you’ etc. “Little happy faces … or a sad face … little abbreviations,” show up even in letters of academic appeal, “Instead of ‘because’, it’s ‘cuz’, “college” is replaced by “clg” and ‘Definitely’ is always spelled with an ‘a’ – ‘definately’. “The words ‘a lot’ have become one word, for everyone. “Good” is replaced by “gd” which is also used for “God”.
Also now a day’s youngsters rely wholly on computer spellcheckers to auto-correct their mistakes. So, they have relaxed their minds from putting effort on remembering spellings and exact rules of grammar because the whole work is now done by auto-correct option in the computer.
To make matters worse, many parents do nothing to try to improve these crucial skills and keep on complaining only. Students make a lot of Punctuation errors and also commit weird apostrophe errors because students have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is meant for.
The worst happens when these writing habits are found in formal writings, as the Internet norm of ignoring punctuation and capitalization as well as using emoticons may be acceptable in an e-mail to friends and family, but it can have a fatal effect on one’s professional image, if used at work.
Therefore, we as academicians should try to develop such culture where reinforcement must be provided for those who are promoting writing culture. We should use complete words,spellings and sentences while interacting through social media sites, without emphasizing on the fear that others will make fun of us for it.
Good luck, Writing skill !!!