by Matt Bird

Created on: June 12, 2009   Last Updated: August 04, 2010

Gah. The Internet may be one of the greatest sources of information on the planet, but it's also the cause of more typos and grammatical errors than I think I've ever seen in any one thing.

The Internet is all about speed and efficiency. People want things done and communicated in as short a time as possible. Bing, bang, boom, sent off. This applies to virtually everything, as well: e-mails, forum posts, chat room dialogues, whatever you can imagine. Consequently users make mistakes a lot, and quite often they're the same mistakes over and over. (Usually because they're using a QWERTY keyboard. Everybody's fingers fumble in the same way, I guess.)

Here are just a few of the most common problems I've seen in online writing. They aren't even close to covering all the flubs.

- No punctuation. Yuck. This is the most common error by far, as people dispense with periods, apostrophes, commas and all the rest, letting fly with a string of unbroken words. They generally make sense, but from a linguistic point of view these so-called 'sentences' are abhorrent.

- No capitalization. Double yuck. To maximize speed people type in words as quickly as possible and don't bother with the good old shift key. Again, this doesn't do much to prevent understanding, but it's really, really annoying.

- There, they're and their. Few seem capable of understanding the difference between these three important words. As a result you'll often be faced with sentences the likes of "look over their!", "there all going on a camping trip" or "they're, all done". Or rather it should be "theyre, all done", since apostrophes are an abomination in the eyes of Internet users. (Please note that people outside 'net users get this wrong, as well.)

- The. Yes, the. People get the word 'the' wrong all the time, usually substituting in 'teh' instead. It's gotten so pervasive that lots of users write 'teh' on purpose, usually when making some smarmy comment.

- Then and than. Less than, greater than, and "then we went and bombed our English test". Not less then, greater then and "than we went and bombed our English test," because THEN you really will.

- Definately. I can't blame many people because I still mess this one up from time to time. It's supposed to be 'definitely'. (Defiantly is also popular. It's a word, yes, but it's WRONG!)

- Inserting numbers into words. Things like l8r, l8, sum1 and other such bizarre cobblings are really common with people who are too lazy to spell the full word out. Does it really take up THAT much of your time?

I could go on and on for hours, but you get the point. Internet users are either bad spellers or they don't care enough to use proper English. And given the ever-increasing emphasis on speed, I can't see that this trend will change any time soon. Sigh.

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