tspikes51

A majority of Americans use Internet forums, chat rooms, and instant messaging almost daily, and what a wonderful thing they are, but at what cost do these come? The abilities of the average American to use written American English have, in my opinion, been on a decline for quite some time now, resulting in a lack of understandability. Formal English is not there just to look pretty, it is there to standardize the language to make it easier to understand. I can understand somebody using abbreviations, phonetic spellings, written dialogues, and such (sometimes to the point where intelligible English is at a complete lack) in an instant message or chat room, much like using informal spoken English in a conversation. The problem arises, however, when this transfers into peoples' speech and writing where they are attempting to communicate with a person who doesn't use those sorts of things. I talk to people quite often that will not only not understand some words that I am using, but just aren't able to understand what I mean because I put my words together in a somewhat correct form. Part of this is to blame on our educational system, where our schools now fail to teach proper grammar and prose to students. I am a freshman in college at the moment, and most of my classmates would write in a paper, for example, "he did it good." In any Romance language (Spanish, French, Romanian, Portuguese, Italian), this would not even mean the same thing as "he did it well", or even be grammatically possible. Our language is taking on evolution for the worse. I only hope that we can revive it.

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