Cellphone texting and social networking on Internet sites are degrading writing skills, say even experts in the field.
"I think it has," says Joel Postman, author of "SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate," who has taught Fortune 500 companies how to use social networking.
The Internet norm of ignoring punctuation and capitalization as well as using emoticons may be acceptable in an e-mail to friends and family, but it can have a deadly effect on one's career if used at work.
"It would say to me ... 'well, this person doesn't think very clearly, and they're not very good at analyzing complex subjects, and they're not very good at expressing themselves, or at worse, they can't spell, they can't punctuate,' " he says.