From PRNewswire-FirstCall:

With the use of email, instant messaging and cell phones on the rise, almost half of the adults surveyed nationally feel that vocabulary skills of young people are declining as a result. What effect will this have on the future success of our nation’s youth? The Reader’s Digest National Word Power Challenge(SM) commissioned a national telephone survey(1) of 1,000 adults, 18 and older, to gauge how these new modes of communication may be affecting the vocabulary skills of today’s kids. The results of this study, released today, show 45% of the respondents feel that kids’ vocabulary is declining; 26% believe these skills are improving; 21% think vocabulary skills remain the same, and 8% had no opinion.

The survey also found that career, overwhelmingly, is the area of life that has the greatest impact for a strong vocabulary (75% cite it). When asked which area had the second greatest impact, 65% say relationships. The higher the education level of the adult, the greater the feeling that career will be most positively impacted by having a strong vocabulary.

I think there’s a good cross-section of ages represented on gaming bulletin boards – I’ve been visiting some of those recently to read about PSP news. I found that there really is a wide distribution of vocabulary and “effort” in creating reasonable posts that seems to loosely follow age (as far as I can tell from the info that is given).

The good news is that depth of thought tends to follow grammar and vocabulary closely. People who have something interesting to say write it in a way that will get it read seriously. When you see a terribly-written post, it usually is some sort of flame or useless comment. What I’m trying to say is that I think when people of all ages know it matters, they speak properly, and if they aren’t able to, they find themselves at a disadvantage.

This would relegate chat-speak to being merely a slang, which really doesn’t bother me personally. I think the rule of thumb is, if your kid is speaking l33t h@xor speak all the time, they don’t have important enough things going on in their lives to motivate them to speak seriously – and that’s the core problem.