Internet chatrooms and social networks induce bad spelling

INTERNET (We have included seven typos in this article, one of which was contained in the original article - can you spot them?) It isn't as though we didn't know it, but a paper released by the English Spelling Society confirms that the internet has revolutionised the English language, and made misspelling the norm. As people type at speed online, there is now a "general attitude" that there is no need to correct mistakes or conform to regular spelling rules, it says. Children who have been bought up with the internet do not question wrongly spelled words. "The increasing use of variant spellings on the internet has been brought about by people typing at speed in chat rooms and on social networking sites where the general attitude is that there isn't a need to correct typo's or conform to spelling rules," says the study authored by Lucy Jones.>The paper, which surveyed a group of 18-24-year-olds as part of the research, found that the majority beleive that unconventional spellings are used on the internet because it is faster and has become the norm.

More than one in five (22%) said they would not be confident in writing an important email without refering to a dictionary or spell checker.

Despite the widespread use of so-called "variant" spelling, almost a third (31%) of those questioned said that alternative non-standard spellings are "completely unacceptable."

Two thirds (66%) believe that dictionaries should contain variant spellings.

Jack Bovill, Chair of the English Spelling Society, said: "Accurate spelling is of the utmost importance, but from this most recent survey we can conclude that the unprescedented reach and scale of the internet has given rise to new social practises and it is now an agent in spelling change."