I make some typos, and occasionally I misspell a word or two. But this made my eyes hurt (emphasis mine):
ALL THAT SHOUTING!!! And lack of punctuation. I wonder if this is the same guy who writes the Nigerian money scams?
So here’s what I wonder: can you quantify the monetary effects of bad spelling? In the example above, here’s a guy trying to get $5,000 or more out of us, and he can’t even spell “motor”? Do I want to send my hard-earned money to a mental defective like that? I think not!
I tend to avoid dealing with people who have overtly bad spelling and/or grammar. I generally attribute this to a few things:
- I tend not to want to fork over money to someone who can’t be arsed to check his own damn spelling.
- Laziness and ignorance in presenting one’s own enterprises tends to spill over into the business end of said enterprise.
- It therefore calls into question how competent he has been in describing and disclosing all pertinent information about the product in the listing, how quickly he will ship said product, and how well he can be expected to pack it up for its journey.
- I will have to talk to this person. Probably more than once. If my head wants to explode reading the listing, I do not want to tempt fate by entering into an agreement wherein he will have to type even more.
I tend to think that I (and I’m sure more here besides) am in the statistical minority which may or may not represent a significant monetary loss.
The quoted material in the OP makes Baby Jesuit Technical Writers cry.
I’d be suspicious, too, and probably pass this one by.
I wonder how the seller would react to a message along the lines of, “Do you know how much money your bad spelling is costing you?”
“HOW WOOD U NO ?I GOT %4 WATCHES ALREDY ON THE AUCTIN THATS WHAT U NO CABBAGES.”
Whenever I see this degree of blatant misspelling, I like to think [pray] that the perpetrator isn’t a native English speaker. The internet/information/digital age has brought this to light in a terrible way because you don’t know if the offender’s cringe-inducing attempts at communcation might actually be the very commendable effort of someone who is very smart and probably speaks more than just one language. It’s easy to take jabs at someone who can’t speak English properly, but how many of us can speak or type flawlessly in another language?
Having made a legitimate case for those new to English, however, the real fear still remains: that I’m probably wrong and there really are native speakers who are that stupid, lazy, and/or probably earning more money than I am.