I spend much of the day correcting colleagues’ English. Spelling and grammar in documents mostly, but also the spoken word.

So given Twitter is all about conversations, shouldn’t tweets aspire to the same levels of accuracy? Sadly, for too many of us, it seems not.

All too often those 140 maximum characters pay no heed to the need for capital letters, full-stops or even questionmarks. You can call me an anally-retentive saddo who should find something better to do. You can make a feeble point that technology has changed our linguistic needs and text messaging has embraced similar slackness for years, so why should Twitter make an effort? Interesting points, yet they do not detract from the important fact – I am right, and you are wrong.

So building on the Twitter editorial baiting stereotypes of a few weeks ago, let’s call this digital disease Twilliteracy. I’m claiming this as my own term because while there are a couple of other references to it already, they’re pretty limp efforts.

The traits of Twilliteracy I’ve seen litter ‘conversations’ are things like failing to capitalise properly.

Failing to use a questionmark for a question (therefore often rendering the prose a statement).

Using yoof spellings because you think it makes you look clever (silly if you are a youth, unforgiveable if you’re older).

Not using full-stops.

Failing to appreciate the difference between quotation marks and inverted commas.

Simply shit spelling.

I’ll stop now. But let me leave you with this thought: 140 characters is a wonderful opportunity for brevity and pointedness in copywriting. It is not an excuse for turning your already-probably-pretty-slack English into something of the lowest grade.

It’s a conversation, not the mumbling of morons.