2 Feb
2004
2 Feb
'04
3:54 p.m.
On Feb 2, 2004, at 2:57 PM, Teo Zenios wrote:
What is the burning desire that makes people go out of their way to
correct
grammar in posts? Unlike in programming where a decimal point in the
wrong
place means something completely different , you can misspell a word
and the
target audience still knows exactly what your talking about. The
English
language is full of words bastardized by the locals to communicate with
whatever society conquered England at the time (Vikings, Normans,
etc). The
language and spelling changes slightly every year and can be used to
figure
out what society and era the text came from (I bet bootyliscious is in
the
dictionary by now).
BS. Nobody's correcting anything that's in the gray zone.
Why do we "go out of our way" to correct abominable grammar,
spelling, or the latest "Caps-don't-mean-shit-to-me-so-why-bother"
attitude?
Because it's like fingernails on a chalk board. Because I write
technical documentation for a living and I know that, no matter what
the lazy writer or correspondent wants to believe, it *does* matter.
If nothing else, it makes the writer appear sloppy and uneducated. To
the literate reader, even a minor mistake in spelling or punctuation
causes a stop and check, costing time and irritation.
For a person whose first language is not English, and there are many
on this list, your claim that "the target audience knows exactly what
your[0] talking about" is not a reasonable assumption at all. It's
only your familiarity with idiom and correct usage that allows you to
translate the mistakes easily.
Mostly, to me, it's insulting. I go to some trouble to make sure
that my writing and my correspondence are correctly proofed and
sensible. I sort of expect the same behavior, especially in a group of
ostensibly intelligent and educated technicians.
A total absence, or random misuse, of capitals and punctuation not
only negates any credibility the writer or poster might have had, and
the post takes much, much longer to parse. I usually don't bother to
try to read that sort of spew at all.
Mostly I go to the trouble to correct consistent bad grammar or
spelling because much of what I know I learned when somebody told me
"Hey, did you know you're screwing that up?" If I can't take
reasonable correction and learn from it, that pretty much defines me as
an idiot.
Doc, putting away the soapbox
[0] Took all I had not to misquote that.