In my investigation, I found that the younger tweeters were a lot
less formal and used a lot less proper English language, compared to the older
people who used full sentences and correct grammar.
The 17/18 year olds use little grammar, using overall 69, (11 per
person) capital letters between them in the data I collected. And even so most
of these capital letters were used to emphasize speech by writing a whole
sentence in capital. They use very little full stops at the end of their tweets
and use almost no commas. They make a lot of spelling mistake either on purpose
for comedic effect, or because they don’t take the time read the tweets and
edit them to the correct language. They use a lot of slang and made up words
such as ‘Haha’ and ‘lmao’. They also use a considerable amount of curse words
or bad words in their tweets, usually to emphasize anger and emotion. Overall
90 (15 per person) slang/swear words were used in all of the data collected
from the young tweeters.
The younger tweeters tended to tweet more about themselves and
used it to spread the thoughts and feeling that they had. They talk about
typical young themes like College, Friends and Drinking and all the things that
are happening to them or their friends. The focus of the tweet is usually comic
and the teenagers try to impress each other with humor They also make a lot
of complaint tweets to rant about bad things happening to them during the day.
They use it for communication between friends so they can talk to people and
then get others input if they wanted. They use a lot less links and hashtags
and write more pure tweets of just a small written sentence. The tweets are
usually much shorter and made up of just little comments from the tweeter.
The older tweets, aged between 50 and 60, are a lot more
grammatical and use a lot better language than the younger tweeters. Most of
them use full stops after the end of every sentence and use the correct grammar
throughout their tweets. They use capital letters where needed, using 381(63
per person) between them. They make less spelling and grammatical mistakes as
they would probably take the time to write the tweet and to check it for any
faults. They use a very formal structure, as if they are writing a full,
correct sentence. They use less slang and only use it very occasionally, using
only little words like ‘Aw’. They use little expletives or bad words and when
they do they are only mild like words such as ‘Heck’ and ‘Christ’, to make them
seem more proper and adult. The tweets are usually based around news events and
things happening around the world and are written more like little statements
not as much about how they’re feeling and what thoughts they have, unlike the
younger tweeters. They use more links to images and use hashtags more
frequently than the youngsters The tweets themselves are also a lot longer and
are like full sentences rather than little thoughts. They are also a lot less
comedic and more to the point of their tweet and use twitter to just tell
people what they are doing, rather than how they are feeling.
