Spelling and Grammatical Errors in Electronic Meetings

Participants in electronic meetings are often fairly informal with their typing and make spelling and grammatical mistakes, perhaps realizing that such errors are not viewed as important in such free-flow, rapid-paced discussions. Although most researchers, group members, and meeting facilitators have noted these errors, no study has been conducted on the types of errors made or their correlations with measures of meeting productivity. Results of an experiment involving five groups of 10 students each show that the generated comments contained relatively few misspellings but several minor grammatical errors. Further, those who wrote more comments made more errors, but the sentence complexity and members’ satisfaction with the system were not significantly correlated with errors.