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

July 6, 2009 at 10:40 am PT

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.

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Tagged with: Amazon, Andy Jordan, digital, Digits, frontpage, gooseGrade.com, grammar, Internet, microblogging, social networking, software, spelling, Tech Diary, The Wall Street Journal, Twitter

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