The Impact of Social Media Slang on the Academic Writing Skills of Graduate Students: A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

This quantitative, corpus-based study examines the impact of social media slang and computer-mediated communication on the academic writing skills of graduate students. In contemporary digital environments, continuous exposure to informal online discourse has increasingly blurred the boundary between digital conversational language and formal scholarly expression. The primary aim of this research is to measure the extent to which daily media interaction statistically interferes with formal academic register use by graduate students. Data were collected using three instruments: a compiled corpus of 120 graduate-level academic texts (approximately 185,000 words), a structured linguistic feature checklist typology on syntax, lexical, orthographic, and syntactic elements, and a standardized questionnaire to measure students’ frequency and intensity of social media usage. Descriptive statistics and categorical coding, while statistical procedures were applied to examine relationships between digital communication habits and the occurrence of informal linguistic markers in academic writing. The results indicate that 68% of the analyzed texts contain identifiable instances of social media-influenced language. Digital acronyms and abbreviations account for 27% of deviations, informal contractions for 21%, non-standard punctuation and orthographic variations for 14%, and colloquial lexical choices for 6%. Statistical testing revealed a significant positive correlation (r = 0.62, p < 0.05) between frequency of daily social media usage and the presence of informal linguistic markers in academic texts. Regression analysis further demonstrated that social media engagement significantly predicts the decline of formal register adherence (β = 0.58, p < 0.01). These findings quantitatively confirm the habitual digital communication practices have a measurable impact on the quality, clarity, coherence, and rhetorical authority of academic writing. The study implies a growing linguistic challenge in graduate education and recommends the integration of data-driven digital literacy programs, academic register training, and structured writing interventions to mitigate the influence of informal digital discourse on scholarly communication.