Would you be willing to share that URL? My mom’s doctor recently brought this idea up, and she might be interested in at least lurking there a little.
My eldest sister, who holds a PhD in education, and two Masters Degrees, one of them in English writes on line like a sixteen year old high school drop out.
how r u
No punctuation, no caps, no real sentence structure. Just stream of conscious crap with no effort at grammar. She uses every single bad grammar convention you find on the web. When I got the first email from her my reply was,
What? You’re a freakin’ English teacher for God’s sake!!
She now writes to me in complete sentences, with punctuation and paragraphs. I don’t know why, but the Internet seems to be a pernicious influence on English. Is that true for other languages? Is there fractured Japanese on the web? Do French kids say the equivalent of l33t speak?
Tris
That reads like my former boss’ e-mail, except that his would have been two paragraphs of uninterrupted run-on glurgage leaving you wondering whether he was informing you of something, demanding that you perform a task, or spamming nutritional supplements.
I’m not saying there aren’t a few people hanging around who could use a brain implant, but generally speaking I don’t think the idiots can keep up. If only the SMDb could start some kind of intramural breeding program I suspect that Homo sapiens doperis would speciate and split off from the rest of humanity in short order.
Stranger
Ahh, the sweet smell of eugenics in the morning.
Signed,
OneCentStamp
5’9"
eyes brown
hair brown
blood type O-
vision 20/50 without corrective lenses
family history of cancer
I run a message board focusing on a niche topic – urban planning – and there is a fairly high level of discussion, even in the off-topic areas. I credit it to three things:
-
Demographics. The median age of a member of my board is in the low 30s.
-
Moderation. Moderation is very strict, in the manner of the SDMB and Something Awful. Strict moderation is required to ensure the site is seen as a legitimate resource by other planners. The moderators are also older, and they have less tolerance for AOL-speak.
-
Subject matter. Most people visit the site because they’re professional planners or planning students looking for information. They’re not likely to post a message like “Doodz teh zoning in teh city where i work is totally gay and sucks its old and traditional euclidian what can i do about it???”
Even then, the site still isn’t taken seriously by some planners, who associate ALL forums with teenage one-liner posters. Instead, they prefer the seclusion of listservs. Older, more intelligent folks online might have joined a listserv early on, and became entrenched, not having the time or inclination to seek out or start a message board for their favorite topic.
MetaFilter generally has a pretty high level of discussion.
What high school did you go to?
The Madonna boards are pretty good, actually. Better than you’d think. I’ve only seen two posters who consistently posted in all caps, and thread titles are pretty descriptive.
Examples:
** * [DL] RIT Rehearsals HQ REMASTERED(320 kbps)
-
New Madonna pictures in London
-
“Jump” jumps to #1 on the US chart
-
Mirwais Dug His Own Grave**
It’s all pretty gramatically correct.
My biggest peeve is that people will inter-inter-inter-inter-inter-quote, so you get posts that look like this:
This, combined with the HUGE showy signatures some people have, makes it very hard to scroll through and parse threads efficiently. I wish they would take away the quote button so you’d have to quote manually by typing in the code and c & ping the other person’s text. I think inter-quoting happens because people just press the “quote this post” button and don’t bother to modify the code to excise any quotes used by the post they are quoting. Also, I wish they would have a rule about only posting your sig ONCE per page, if not per thread. But I’m not a mod, what do I know.
Talking Broadway’s All That Chat is recognized as the best of the theatre forums.
Hmm… I’ve noticed a certain pattern in the message boards I frequent.
The more technical or education-related the subject matter is, the better the writing (duh!)
I regularly read Tanknet.com, Bobistheoilguy.com, BrewBoard.com, Dodgeforum.com, durango-dakota.com and this one.
Tanknet is generally pretty good, although you get a lot of common misspellings and occasional sketchy grammar. I get the impression that most of the people there are either military history buffs and/or former officers and NCOs from english-speaking militaries.
Bobistheoilguy is kind of perplexing. There are some really well-thought out posts (dope-esque, even!), interspersed with some nigh-on illiterate ones. I guess that’s what you get when you mix tribologists (lubrication engineers) with gearheads. You also get some pretty stunning ignorance of many concepts and facts that I consider pretty basic.
BrewBoard is not too far from the Dope. Something about homebrewing or homebrewers makes them pretty articulate when it comes to message boards.
The last two, the DodgeForum & Durango-Dakota boards, are pretty much bastions of meaty gear-headedness. Lots of moronic guys going on in length about how they tricked out their Dakota truck and lowered it, or how Quaker State is made of paraffin wax, or other idiotic stuff. And, while they’re doing this, they’re using worse grammar and spelling that I did in 3rd grade. It’s hard to read, but I wade through certain particular forums for technical info posts(I found the factory shop manuals for my truck in PDF there), and the occasional nugget of wisdom left by one of the non-apish posters.
Damn but you’re on form!
Maybe it’s self-selecting, but the other message boards I frequent seem to be pretty good too. Enworld is the only other message board to which I post frequently, but I browse Avforums and SFFtech regularly.
My only semi-related observation is, and sadly I see it sometimes apply here as well, that question marks seem to be in short supply. Why is that? Why do people type out a query and then turn it into a declarative statement? It drives me batshit.
TalkBass - not many idiots here.
That’s because bass players tend to be the more intelligent musicians. We need good communication skills so that we’re able to translate the keyboard player’s complex jargon into simple, one-syllable words that the drummer can understand. We also need to be able to mediate the ego conflicts between the guitarist and lead singer, which calls for clear communication.
Oh, you better believe it. Korean l33tspeak makes my brain hurt. Plus, they think it’s cute to use little animated GIFs when chatting on MSN. For example, the word “mal” means both “horse” and “to speak” in Korean. One of my friends set up her MSN chat so every time she types in “mal” a little animated horse pops up instead. So when she types:
Her: You know what I’m saying?
the message I get is:
Her: You know what I’m <little picture of horse galloping>?
It drives me CRAZY. She is a freakin’ certified accountant with a degree from one of the best universities in Korea. And she communicates, not only with pictures, but with PUNNING pictures. God save us all.
For just a moment I thought there was a board devoted strictly to my favorite Ale. But No!
I wonder if my Nephew knows that board, he plays base for a local metal band. I’ll have to ask him.
Jim
Thanks - I always knew there must be a reason to have bass players in bands!
(ducks, runs, etc.)
My husband and I are on a message board that split off from the poker boards when the U.S. government shoved its head firmly up its ass, and I’m so frustrated with the political/debate threads over there that I’m starting to bait people. Arrgh. Most of them wouldn’t recognize an original thought if it crept up on them and bite them in the ass (even the paranoid conspiracy nuts). It is a shocking contrast to read this board and that one at the same time. Of course, in all fairness, that board is mostly a poker board with a side order of sex talk. I’m just totally spoiled by The Dope.
I think what I like about this place is that “my post is my cite” is actually used as a form of ridicule by posters on every side of the issues. The idea of actually having to back up what you say with some hard evidence is completely alien to many boards.
I used to post in the news forums at JapanToday (now CrissCross), but at some point the owners concluded that flamewars -> more posts -> more pageviews -> more ad revenue, and began steering the place straight into the sewer. When it became clear that the newspaper’s own editors were trolls trying to provoke one screaming match after another by framing their articles to be as outrage-inspiring as possible, I gave up.
I miss Aldeberon.