Persons who eschew apostrophes & other punctuation in writing: why do you do this?

I prefer fully punctuated and capitalized sentences, because they are easier to read. I produce them because they are easy for me to produce. I never have to put any effort at all into typing punctuation, correctly capitalizing, etc., because for whatever reason, it has always been nearly instinctive to me.

My husband, though, who reads as many books as I do, cannot punctuate and can barely spell. He can produce perfect sentences but has no idea where the capital letters or period should go. When he attempts to guess, he gets it wrong more often than not. This is not for lack of effort, either. On the other hand, he knows instinctively how to pick up any object lying around and use it to block an attack. It takes me two weeks of daily practice to learn a kata that he can commit to memory and perform immediately on seeing it. We have different skills.

So I don’t assume that lack of punctuation is laziness. Complete lack of punctuation is easier to read than randomly wrong punctuation. If a person has read a novel or two a week since high school and is now in his 40s, and still no matter how long he spends trying, can’t tell what a noun is or where a period goes - it’s just not a productive use of his time. If it’s very important, I read over what he wrote and put in the punctuation and capitalization, and fix the spelling. (He’s got better at spelling, slowly. It used to be about every third word was wrong - “thay” for they, “hert” for hurt, “ezear” for easier - now it’s more like a typical bad speller, a huge improvement for him). Unlike most dyslexics he can read perfectly well (though that took him till about 8th grade - he had a lot of trouble reading in earlier years) and never leaves out words. But grammar just makes no sense to him. And yet he uses it perfectly, I almost never hear him saying anything remotely ungrammatical - but he has no conscious comprehension of the grammar, it’s just how he talks.

There’s so much variety in human cognition.

so win i see ritting like this i offen think of my husbind he is a reely creative persen with an ixtensive vocabulary that he youses effectively in most situashins obveously theres a challange too reading text like this sometimes tho it is worth the effert sometimes not

That’s not exactly how he writes, but maybe it’s how I would write if I had the same problem. His writing is more engaging, because he’s more naturally likeable than I am, and it conveys through his voice: he writes exactly like he talks. So do I, and I’m a much more pedantic type who keeps adding weasel words because I’m not sure. I feel like I have to convey my level of conviction with words like “probably” and “very” and “almost” and “rather”, though I recognize they detract from the readability of what I write (and therefore I sometimes go over and edit and remove them). I feel an impulse right now to go and add “sometimes” or “may” in front of “detract” in the previous sentence, but I won’t. At least, this time I won’t. :slight_smile:

Jake, I wasn’t criticizing. I was asking. Besides, I spend 90 percent on my time on the Dope plotting mischief, not writing hypos.

I can think of a specific poster who eschews apostrophes whom I think far from moronic; though that poster and I disagree on many issues, I always find his posts interesting and enlightening. I’m quite sure he’s not doing it out of ignorance.

I would assume this has something to do with cell phone and text messaging. It’s easier to do this.

Mine doesn’t move around much. It’s almost always right where I left it.

When texting or IMing people, I leave out punctuation if they do. I use punctuation if they do. Online, I always use punctuation because it’s “expected,” because it increases my credibility, and because, well, I like to show that I know proper grammar (it makes me feel superior, yes).

With friends who don’t use punctuation, I don’t feel any need to prove myself. They either don’t know the difference anyway (like a couple guys I know who just have terrible spelling and grammar in general), or they know, they know I know, but don’t care to make the effort.

I start off conversations with a new person using perfect capitalization and punctuation, but if they respond with textspeak and misspellings, I generally lower my style.