I remember seeing something called "Sound Off" on a friend's webpage. "Sound Off" is a bit like this page that you are at right now. In one installment, she complained that others rarely use correct grammar when Instant Messaging. I suppose that you are familiar with AOL Instant Messenger, since many people are. If you aren't, it is essentially a two-person "chat" room. You can talk to your "buddies" when they are online, and simultaneously go about your tasks. Since everyone is trying to type as fast as they can talk, simply out of habit, bad grammar forms. Many abbreviations are used, and I admit that I use these as much as the next guy.

How can you tell if someone uses the Internet too much?
All that they do when you say something funny is mutter, "lol, lol".

That little joke is on topic. People use these abbreviations almost out of reflex, so much so that they almost become new words, not abbreviations.

People also find it difficult to distinguish between "their," "they're," and "there," and between "its" and "it's". I find no trouble with any of these, if you simply realize that each has its own meaning. If someone is used to using correct grammar, they kind of go weird (I speak from experience) whenever someone else mis-uses or mis-spells a word. I think that to stop this problem, people should read more books, which use correct grammar.

Another thing that annoys me is in the writings of K. A. Applegate and Timothy Zahn is that they use the interjection "so" like this: "So. Why do you want to sell your gila monster and make a living eating frisbees?" There should be a comma after "so"! "So" is a conjunction which should be seperated from the sentence by a comma. That "so" thing drives me so crazy!

For the other side of the grammar-check arguement, misspelling a word can add emphasis to it (COOOOOOOOOOOL!!!!!!!! is a decent example). The afore-mentioned abbreviations also add emphasis, and so they should be ignored by grammar checkers. Also, Instant Messaged sentences are rarely complete. These three factors would throw off a grammar check.