Okay, I’ve been away from SDMB for a few weeks.
Have been reading AVS forum for resarch…
OMG! since leaveing the SD, Every day I come across a horrefying grammatical mistakes and spelling errors
Are all other forums this bad?
I could make this a poll by asking: Who get’s annoyed by dumb mistakes like ‘Your’ and ‘You’re’ ect. I know theyr attempting to get a point across and its not a science forum… But…!
If someone were to offer an opinion in a newspaper and fill it with spelling errors… do you feel the information they’re providing to be slightly discredited by their literacy or is this just elitism. Perhaps I’m just used to the SDMB level: Even in the Pit people can spot the error in ‘REDICULOUS replacement lamp PRICES!!!’
Gaudere’s ears must be burning. I realise I may be missing the joke, but was the smiley meant to cover
resarch
leaveing
horrefying
get’s
ect
theyr
“If someone were to offer an opinion in a newspaper and fill it with spelling errors… do you feel the information they’re providing to be slightly discredited by their literacy or is this just elitism”
Okay, this isn’t on literacy, per se, (though I could complain about that, too), but in the same vein . . . I’ve been participating in some other boards lately which are dedicated to one special purpose or another, and I made up my mind when I joined that I wasn’t going to get involved in any controversial discussions about religion or politics or whatnot. I was there for a specific purpose, and I wasn’t going to antagonize the other posters with irrelevant off-topic debates.
The consequence of this discussion is that I’ve had to watch one horrible fallacy after another fall to the figurative floor, and . . . just . . . lie there. Anyone posting that crap at the SDMB would have had any number of posters, on both sides of the issue, tearing their shoddy reasoning to pieces. Instead, the rotten post just . . . sits there. Or worse, they’ll be cheered on by another poster!
And just grit my teeth and sit on my hands. AARRGGGHH!
They’re not all bad. Most of the message boards I go to are ok, most don’t have as many articulate posters as here, but people are understandable.
The Sims message board is the glaring exception to this. Here’s a real message from there, poster’s name removed to protect the guilty:
"Subject: christmas downloads.u no u want 2 help!
does ne1 no where i can get some good christmas theme objects and stuff. ne help would be very much appreciated(sp?) "
Close to 1/3rd of the messages are that bad if not worse…
elfin, maybe that poster had some sort of voice activated gizmo for posting. (But that is pretty extreme.)
The worst forum that I have seen is a specific “New Age” forum that discourages any form of critical thinking. The forum has been apparently unsupervised (by the well-known publishing house that sponsors it) for the last couple of years and has a sort of “Lord of the Flies” meets guru-speak atmosphere. Some of the posters the most mean-spirited and illiterate “spiritual” people I’ve ever run across.
There are also lots of people who just don’t quite jive with what they claim. One woman who says that she teaches English and science in high school referred to her mother’s chemotherapy as “kimo.”
Another ends almost ever sentence with a question mark as in “I wonder what you are doing?”
My comments are not meant as a put-down for all New Age forums or participants. But this one particular forum is so bad that the “guru” whose ideas are supposed to be discussed no longer links to this website from his own website.
We’ve all come across message boards with questionable standards of written expression. Thankfully, that cannot be said of the SD. Nonetheless, I’m a bit uneasy about the amount of threads and posts which extol the literacy, intelligence, erudition, wittiness etc. of the average Doper. Maybe I’m being too reserved but I can’t help feeling that it’s all a bit self-congratulary and smug. What I’m inexpertly trying to say is that, to borrow a phrase from our nearest neighbours, it’s just not the done thing, old boy.
Depends where you’re standing (and what you define as your country). Looking at a map, I believe Dublin’s nearest neighbour is Wales. But I’m being far to pedantic. Wibble! Wibble! Arse!
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