So how important do you think correct grammar, punctuation and spelling are in the following situations?

  • Business e-mails
  • Personal e-mails
  • Instant messages
  • Blog posts
  • Twitter tweets
  • Online forum posts
  • Text messages
  • Writing code

I used to be terrible at punctuation and grammar when online.  Not because I didn’t know the rules, but because it took too much effort.  I started back in the last half of the 1990s when I started instant messaging and e-mailing lots of people (friends and family).  When I “grew up” and got a real job, I found that this carried over into a lot of my work e-mails as well.  I had enough sense to send “correct” e-mails to customers and clients, but I didn’t seem to find it important for internal messages.

Let me first say that I am sure that almost every post, e-mail, IM and tweet have one or more errors, but somewhere along the way, I’ve changed.  Now, in all but the shortest, three word e-mail responses to close friends or family I make the extra effort to try to clean it up, even if the other person doesn’t do the same.  Even in 95+% of my text messages I try to spell words out, add apostrophes and punctuate.  Even in my code I’ve found that I am better about things — better variable names, more consistent capitalization, more complete sentences in my comments, etc.

I don’t know why I changed on this.  Maybe because I started dealing with more and more customers and got used to it.  Maybe it was the English class I had to take when I finally finished my B.S. program in 2002.  Maybe it was the four years I spent in the interactive department and a newspaper.  Maybe it’s because I thought it would make me cooler (I need all the help I can get).

Anyway, now I have a little dilemma.  Twitter limits tweets to 140 characters.  It’s sometimes hard to put a well constructed sentence together in 140 characters.  Of my whopping 28 tweets so far, only 4 or 5 fail my tests.  Of the rest, most are complete sentences and some are partial sentences similar to news headlines.

There’s no real point to this post.  It was just something I noticed about myself and wondered what thoughts other people have about this.