Grammar in the Age of Social Media

By TAYLOR FARNSWORTH Opinions Editor

Scrolling through social media is often times harmless. Users post about his or her daily activities, or discuss latest trends and political scandals. But in some cases, it becomes daunting as you witness again the misuse of grammar in a 140-character tweet or Facebook post. Your blood begins to boil as you find yourself screaming at your computer screen that it is not “your” it is “you’re.”

The age of social media has taken everything we learned about grammar back in our early years of education and thrown it out the window. English grammar is becoming replaced by gifs, emoticons, and texting abbreviations. A period after a sentence no longer concludes one’s thought. The lack of a comma now makes two unrelated thoughts come together as one. Run-on sentences make the reader feel out of breath. And don’t get me started on how often I see punctuation marks outside of quotation marks. These situations raise the question of how come we allow improper use of grammar to slide on social media, but not in academia?

The question was brought to my attention as I found Donald Trump Jr at the center of social media ridicule for his mis-