LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 25:12 December 2025
ISSN 1930-2940

Editors:
         Selvi M. Bunce, M.A., Ph.D. Candidate
         Nathan Mulder Bunce, M.A., Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Honorary Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

Celebrate India!
Unity in Diversity!!

HOME PAGE

Click Here for Back Issues of Language in India - From 2001

Poetic Encounter
Available in https://www.amazon.in/dp/B09TT86S4T

Poems
Naked: the honest browsings of two brown women
Available in https://www.amazon.in

Decrees
Available in https://www.amazon.com

BOOKS FOR YOU TO READ AND DOWNLOAD FREE!

REFERENCE MATERIALS

BACK ISSUES

  • E-mail your articles and book-length reports in Microsoft Word to languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.

  • PLEASE READ THE GUIDELINES GIVEN IN HOME PAGE IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE LIST OF CONTENTS.

  • Your articles and book-length reports should be written following the APA, MLA, LSA, or IJDL Stylesheet.

  • The Editorial Board has the right to accept, reject, or suggest modifications to the articles submitted for publication, and to make suitable stylistic adjustments. High quality, academic integrity, ethics and morals are expected from the authors and discussants.

Copyright © 2025
M. S. Thirumalai

Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
11249 Oregon Circle
Bloomington, MN 55438
USA
Custom Search

Impact of Social Media on Formal Writing Skills

Aiman Dhanani

Abstract

The use of digital social media in everyday life has significantly altered our communicative practices and offers significant challenges to students' proficiency in formal writing skills. This paper looks at the multiple ways social media impacts writing and writing development, given its emphasis on brevity, immediacy, and casualness. This paper looks at social media's emphasis on brevity, immediacy, and casualness as it sharply contrasts to the conventions of academic and professional writing. Analyses reveal the greatest negative effect is the lack of basic grammatical knowledge and mixing of abbreviations, acronyms, and phonetically-based spellings into students' high-stakes writing. However, there are also affordances in terms of writing practice, collaboration, and critical digital literacy. Therefore, education must account for this in writing instruction, through instructional designs that promote explicit instruction of rhetorical register and students' use of social media, as an instructional tool engaging in structured, deliberate, purposeful learning, so they can learn how to communicate in informal and formal contexts.

Keywords:Formal writing skills, Informal language, Netspeak, Grammatical competence, Digital literacy, Writing process, Academic register.

Introduction

The new educational environment is marked by a radical change in the way information is communicated, received, and, most importantly, how it is authored. Technology has progressed from a passive support in the learning process to the actual setting in which most communication occurs in the 21st century. Among the many digital innovations, social media has been the most powerful to dominate students' daily literacy practices. Sites like Facebook, Twitter (X), Instagram, and WhatsApp have not only given a new avenue to socializing, but have established a new norm of written communication that is real-time, very visible, and inherently informal. This cultural movement requires a critical analysis of its impact because it presents a threat to the core writing skills required for academic and professional achievement.

The main problem discussed in this paper is the reduction in formal writing skills and the capability to write clear, coherent, grammatically correct, and properly styled prose needed in high-stakes situations such as college essays, research papers, and professional correspondence. Such a decline is a direct result of the perpetual reinforcement of habits related to social media's endemic informal language, abbreviations, and emojis. On these sites, speed and emotional impact take precedence over grammatical accuracy and structural coherence, and users are tacitly encouraged to dispense with the conventions of Standard English. The resulting habits intrude into formal assignments, characterized by errors such as missing punctuation, phonetic spellings, and sentence fragmentation. These errors are a source of increasing concern to teachers internationally.

Grasping this issue involves an awareness of the duality of its effect. While social media is usually presented as the villain of formal literacy, it is fundamentally a platform for large volumes of written communication. This mere weight of daily writing practice, albeit informal, can actually increase student interest and confidence in verbal communication. But the pedagogical problem is the conflict of registers: the students are experiencing rhetorical code switching, not picking up the contextual demands of communication and inappropriately switching back and forth between social media's low stakes, convivial register with scholarly discourse's demanding, high stakes requirements. The resulting inability to sustain an objective tone or observe appropriate citation and evidence protocols further undermines formal work integrity.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Aiman Dhanani
VIT Vellore
aiman.parvezdhanani2024@vitstudent.ac.in
Under Professor Dr. Daniel Anburaj
Custom Search
  • Click Here to Go to Creative Writing Section

  • Send your articles
    as an attachment
    to your e-mail to
    languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Please ensure that your name, academic degrees, institutional affiliation and institutional address, and your e-mail address are all given in the first page of your article. Also include a declaration that your article or work submitted for publication in LANGUAGE IN INDIA is an original work by you and that you have duly acknowledged the work or works of others you used in writing your articles, etc. Remember that by maintaining academic integrity we not only do the right thing but also help the growth, development and recognition of Indian/South Asian scholarship.