Technology seems to have grammar on the run these days. The language of the Internet is shorthand -- from brb to lol to turning seriously into "srsly" (saving a whopping four letters) -- and spelling and punctuation take a daily beating on the "interwebz." Does grammar even matter anymore?

Curiosity contributor Susan Sherwood took a look at the increasingly slippery sliding scale of grammar in the 21st century.

Have you seen the new t-shirt for sale? It reads: "Let’s eat, Grandma. Let’s eat Grandma. Punctuation saves lives!" Are conventions of written language such as grammar and punctuation still relevant in today’s world? In an era of Twitter, email, instant messages, social networks and text messages, is it important to stick to the old rules? Or are flexibility and individuality acceptable?

It depends. What’s the purpose of your composition? Obviously, to communicate. Therefore, audience plays a tremendous role. Who’s on the receiving end? If it’s a friend, it may be OK to play fast and loose with standards. It’s very possible your friends are on the same page, so communications contain a significant number of “then/than” confusions, “alot” combinations and “who/whom” mistakes. As long as you are easily getting your point across, does it really matter? “Easily” is important here. Your friends should not have to work to decipher casual passages. It shouldn’t take 10 minutes for your pal to determine that you want to meet for lunch at your favorite restaurant.

On the other hand, you might have friends like me who cringe when they regularly receive messages that are full of mistakes. We all made it through (not “threw”) elementary school, so basic sentence structure and subject/verb agreement should not be too (not “to”) difficult. Still, if it’s someone I like, I’ll just sigh, shake my head and get over it.

There are times, though, when precision and accuracy in writing DO count. You may have done a tremendous amount of research and fully understand social learning theory, but your university psychology professor will be underwhelmed if your paper has no paragraphs, is full of incomplete sentences and lacks clarity. You won’t be able to fully communicate what you know, and that’s going to be reflected in your grade. Just because it’s not a writing course doesn’t mean that composition skills don’t matter.

If you manage to make it through your college experience, you may face potential employers who care a great deal about your written communication skills, especially if they are required for the position. If interoffice memos, communiqués to clients, and media announcements are part of a job, you have to prove you can create them effectively and independently. Sometimes it won’t even matter if you need to write on the job. Kyle Weins, CEO of IFixit, an extensive on-line repair site, won’t hire a person for any position if the candidate can’t pass a required grammar test [source: Harvard Business Review]. Weins judges people by their use of language, believing that those who use good grammar make fewer mistakes overall and pay more attention to detail.

Even if you manage to land the job, companies still care. The Society for Human Resource Management in conjunction with AARP surveyed 430 employers; almost half indicated that training programs were needed for required skills, including grammar [source: Wall Street Journal]. Some companies are having difficulty finding recruits with appropriate skills and have resorted to in-house preparation and instruction.

The bottom line is: If your friends tolerate your individualistic interpretation of grammar rules, you’ve got no problem. However, at school and in the workplace, it’s to one’s advantage to be as accurate and precise as possible. People who choose to ignore this reality may feel, as one student wrote on an exam, “no qualm of conscience, and also not any regret” [source: Universite de Liege]. However, they may have neither luck nor success in the workplace.