The person who actually used “kimo” instead of “chemo” claims to be both an English teacher and science teacher and to proofread the papers of those working on doctorates. She claims that her mother had “kimo.” This is someone that I know only through the internet. For me, her credibility is gone.
Would any of you still believe her?
BTW, I was a teacher and still make some mistakes in spelling myself.
I do not have enough information to say. I can say: (1) she is not writing a paper, (2) I am not grading a paper, (3) my thoughts on her abilities or knowledge relevent to those professions would be based on what she knows about them when those are the topics under discussion, and (4) you knew what she meant by “kimo”, so—for most people in most cases—communication was successful.
Consider the statement you might give her: “You cannot be an English teacher, nor can you be a science teacher, because you spelled the shortened word ‘chemo’ as ‘kimo’.” Consider the weight of such an argument. I don’t find it very convincing, myself.
I know my own spelling and grammar are horrible. I don’t mind if people correct my grammar and spelling in replies to my posts, in fact, I would appreciate it, as I’ve never been taught proper grammar and spelling despite having gone to very good schools all my life. I am slightly dyslexic and learned my vocabulary a very unusual way.
Anyway, because of this I am willing to over-look most typos and misspellings in other people’s posts. Provided that I can understand the argument they are making.
Oh well.
Clarity is very important in a medium that has only one way of representing what you are trying to communicate; ease of communication is also very important. When I am reading a post and I am having a hard time deciphering what the poster is trying to say, I wouldn’t say that necessarily blows their credibility with me, but it is a factor in how I assess what they have said. If they make it too hard to decipher, I ignore their post and move on. They have completely lost communication with me in that case, and their credibility becomes moot.
I believe Dread Pirate Jimbo has it about right. Grammar and typos are not a full barrier to communication; but they do indeed represent a hurdle for the reader to mount. I find going over these kind of hurdles to tease out the writer’s true meaning annoying, but I’m willing to overlook it if they have both good points and good flow.
Good flow is more important to me than grammar. It shows that you have an understanding of how an argument should be structured, while grammar merely shows you know how English should be structured.
If you are indeed posting an argument, and not just socializing, you should take care to structure your argument and buttress your points, otherwise your argument is unsound. The lesser offense of typos and grammatical mistakes make you appear merely lazy and uninformed.
I’m not sure where you’re getting that I’d think that their posts are “not worth considering” – I said that I’d be skeptical (which I’ll amend to say that I’d be more skeptical than I’d be of somebody who didn’t make glaring errors in spelling), but skepticism != outright dismissal. I also never said that there were subjects in which the reading of thousands of articles would be necessary – rather, I said that if somebody claimed to have gained their information from reading thousands of articles (which I’ll amend to include hundreds of articles, or dozens of articles, etc.) and made glaring spelling mistakes that I would be doubtful of their credibility. If somebody said “I know a lot about kemotherapy because my brother went through intensive kemotherapy” (or something similar), then that’s a completely different claim than “I know a lot about kemotherapy because I’ve read lots of articles on kemotherapy” in terms of my being skeptical due to their mispelled words – I’m not going to be more skeptical of the first claim due to the mispelling of the term “kemotherapy,” but I am going to be more skeptical of the second claim.
As an example, compare this reworked OP:
Do you see what I mean? It’s not spelled better, it flows better, which makes it a stronger passage.
Oh, I am not in doubt that you would be (or that others here would be; the assertion is clear enough). I am in awe at the reasoning behind it; I do not understand, and am trying to.
As an example for me, should I doubt any of you really look at things this way because many consistently spell 'misspell
’ as “misspell”? My point is: of course not. Why should I doubt you just because of a misspelling?
LOL, Damn you Gaudere! I am trying to intentionally misspell a word and fail. That’s an application of Gaudere’s law I had never quite considered. 
Here is how it should read
I would doubt that they actually read as much information on chemotherapy (or psychology, or whatever) as they claim when they make glaring spelling mistakes like “kemotherapy” or “sikology” or “kwantum” or whatever. I’m making an assumption about the memory retention of other people, namely that others are capable of remembering coarse detail on spelling without necessarily remembering fine detail on spelling (which is why I wouldn’t be particularly concerned over somebody using “chemotherepy” or whatever), particularly in cases where the coarse detail is used in related words or root words – somebody using “kemotherapy” indicates to me that they have failed to make the connection between the root “chem” and the term “chemotherapy” (a connection that I would expect somebody who has read many articles on the subject to make), and somebody using “sikology” indicates to me that they are unfamiliar with the terms “psychological,” “psychologist,” “psyche,” “psychoanalysis,” etc. (some, or all, of which I would expect somebody to be familiar with if they had read many articles on psychology).
Is it possible that somebody could read many articles on chemotherapy and still call it “kemotherapy”? Sure, but I don’t consider it to be very likely, since (based on my assumptions on memory retention) I don’t see how it would be possible for somebody to see the word “chemotherapy” dozens/hundreds/thousands of times and fail to get the beginning of the word right. Same with somebody using “sikology.” Fine details of word spelling are more difficult to retain (and many people, including me, consider many fine details to be extraneous), so “chemotherepy” or “psycholagy” wouldn’t set off any alarm bells.
I don’t think this is a useful way to address this question. Requiring something to “always” be the case when the issue is obviously a matter of correlation (strong or otherwise) does look like setting up a straw man.
There is actually a counterexample. Proper spelling and grammar is indicative of poor credibility with regard to a claim of being an stupid, uneducated, sloppy, inconsiderate lout.
The straw man having been duly taken care of (with “always” propositions one counterexample is enough), I’d like to address a more useful (IMO) question:
Should the quality of spelling and grammar be considered in a reasonable person’s estimate of a post’s credibility?
My answer is:
Grammar is relevant if the poster’s (implicit or explicit) claim is:
[ul]
[li]being an educated and literate person[/li][li]speaking the post’s language as a first language[/li][li]being a conscientious person[/li][/ul]
Spelling is relevant if the poster’s (implicit or explicit) claim is:
[ul]
[li]any of those named above[/li][li]having read a lot of material containing the misspelled word(s).[/li][/ul]
Additionally the use of multiple exclamation marks is relevant if the poster’s (implicit or explicit) claim is:
[ul]
[li]being a sane person[/li][/ul]
It obviously also matters whether the rule being violated is an important or an obscure one. And of course deliberate misspellings/archaisms don’t count.
Then there is the quite different question:
Given that a case of wrong grammar/spelling is relevant, should I mention it?
Personally, I consider it most productive in most case to keep my own counsel, except when a spelling error is not obvious to non-experts.
There is one case where grammar and spelling mistakes should be addressed:
Anyone who disparages others for being stupid/uneducated/foreigners and makes grammar/spelling mistakes in his/her post is asking for it 
I know you would doubt this. Repeating it doesn’t make it any more clear than that. I believe you, already; I find you to be a credible poster. But you are not asking them, and the context of the conversation isn’t, “Do you know how to spell ‘chemotherapy’ or ‘psychology’?” So how they spell it—so long as the meaning gets across—seems quite irrelevent to me.
Ok. It seems to me that using misspelling as a criterion for credibility, one should also know how to spell the word, in any case. I would, for example, using your reasoning, doubt you investigate classic misspellings that many people make (this is one of the most common), and in doing so, I would find that I think your ability to judge credibility is inadequate whether it is a glaring error or not.
But I am not using your reasoning.
No, but you are claiming that you are enough of an authority on misspelling to use it to judge other people before you even listen to what they have to say.
I spell check and cut and past almost every post I make. I also read them out loud, before I post, if they are more than just quick quips. Why? Mostly it’s because I am functionally illiterate unless you include abysmal spelling and ludicrous typography in your definition of literate. I even pay attention to the grammar advice of MS Word, although I don’t always accept it. Even that doesn’t save me, since I leave the final r off of your so often that it surpasses understanding. Visually, I don’t pick that up on the re read, and MS doesn’t even notice it.
So, I practice the best grammar and spelling that I can, and I almost never point out spelling and grammar errors, unless they produce something exceptionally funny. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t get a subjective impression from your posts about just how much you care about what you say. That affects how much I care about it too.
And if you don’t use capitalization, and paragraph breaks, I don’t even read your posts. It isn’t a judgment of you, or even your point of view. It is a judgment of my ability to read your post, with my bifocaled old eyes. You have (possibly inadvertently) included your expression of your points with a population of self-indulgent posters who have not given me value for my efforts in reading over a long period of on line experience. And that includes my older sister, who is a PHD in EDUCATION, among her six or seven degrees. She doesn’t use the damned caps key, on line! In her case, it pisses me off. In other cases, it just isn’t worth the trouble.
And there is just too much really high quality reading available which does use these simple conventions, and also pleases the inner ear, when read. You are in a very stringent competition here, you know. Maybe on your other boards, that isn’t the case, but here on the SDMB, there are a lot of very interesting and informed voices to be heard. If you wish to indulge yourself with what is, given the available technology, a selfish lack of intellectual rigor, you do so at the peril of being ignored by default.
Why do you post? Me, I post because I want people to read, and perhaps consider what I write.
Tris
If someone claimed to have read extensively or to be an expert in a field of knowledge that they demonstrated repeated inability to spell, it would cause me to be highly skeptical of their claim. If, on the other hand, they produced a minor typo easily attributable to typing “at speed” or not thinking through the word, especially if it were a technical term (e.g., “-phenol” for “-phenyl” or “mammology” for “mammalogy” where the traditional “-ology” ending would tend to mislead, I’d have much more respect for their claim. And, as noted, someone can have a fair amount of personal acquaintance with the effects of a medicament of which they’ve only heard the name and are, if not familiar with the roots underlying the generic name or what the pharmaceutical company decided was a catchy trade name, unaware of how to spell the name in writing. My life was saved in CCU by a clot-dissolver drug that to this day I don’t know how to spell.
Hmm, well Eris I’ve tried to explain my logic through examples because the reason for counting spelling and grammar are more of an intuition, than a straight point by point reasoning.
Part of the reason for the disconnect may be that you seem to be under the impression that I (I’ll not attempt to speak for others) ALWAYS apply the spelling and grammar “rule.” You provide trivial examples of spelling errors like “gost.” Loinburger has, I believe, adequately provided a more pertinent example of a situation where poor spelling casts doubt on a person’s credibility.
It has been my experience that in posts where people attack another’s credibility over spelling or grammar, it is usually in a situation where the error directly relates to the subject matter or the poster’s claimed expertise. THOSE are the errors that concern me, not a trivial misspelling.
I’ve also seen people correct errors when it is obvious that the poster does not know the rules of grammar. In these cases I don’t think the purpose is to attack their credibility, but to simply educate.
As I have tried to get across, spelling and grammar are only a part of what I use to judge credibility, a part that can drop to no importance if the context does not require it. It is NEVER the only criterion and certainly cannot be applied before I have read the content of a post.
This is not a black and white issue, as you seem to want it to be. It is foolish to say I ALWAYS dismiss people with poor grammar. Can you honestly say that you have NEVER in your life been wary of the credibility of someone who presented themselves poorly?
I guess I’m not sure how to make it any clearer as to why I doubt it, other than to say again that I’d expect somebody who has read a significant amount on chemotherapy to be able to get the gist of the word’s spelling correct. They can communicate effectively by spelling the term “kemotherapy,” I’m not questioning that – what I’m questioning is that somebody who has read as much on chemotherapy as this person has claimed to have done would use a ‘k’ instead of ‘ch’ at the beginning of the word when spelling at the beginning of the word is the most critical (esp. for purposes of indexing). They’ve apparently never looked up chemotherapy in an index, or card catalog, or glossary, or in a web search, etc. Same with the person using “sikology” and “kwantum” – no amount of looking in the “k” section of an index will yield the term “kwantum.”
I’ve never claimed any authority from written sources – I’m a computer scientist, not a linguist or grammarian or whatever the relevant profession may be. The only non-intuitive criterion I use for judging a spelling as either “gross” or “insignificant” (I’d call “the beginning of the word ought to be spelled correctly, because otherwise the person cannot index or look up the term” to be an intuitive criterion) is the fact that people tend to remember the beginnings and endings of words/lists/etc. better than they remember the middles, so by my one non-intuitive criterion the difference between “misspell” and “mispell” would be insignificant.
Yes, if somebody doesn’t even know a word’s spelling enough to be able to index the term, then I’ll doubt that they’ve read a significant amount on the subject. It’s an admittedly intuitive criterion, though, and not based from Jack’s Authoritative Book on Mis(s)pellings or whatever the relevant reference would be.
And I would expect people who use spelling as a criterion to be authoritative spellers, else their judgement is itself in question.
I don’t see that that follows. You insist it is an unintentional—and hence uninformed—misspelling. To make this assessment seems to me to require more than observing a specific series of misspelled words.
Thank you.
I can easily ignore accidental typos, or where a person does not know the proper rule. What really gets me is where the writer knows what he wants to say, but uses the “wrong” rule.
For example, idiots who use quotation marks when they ought to be using underlining or some other form of emphasis. Why don’t they realize the quotes are to deemphasize something, the written equivalent of saying “so-called”.
Poly
Why not just evaluate the claim itself? Isn’t this the genetic fallacy?