I see what you’re saying, but I’m not as likely to take advice on something mechanical, electrical, or technical from someone on a messageboard who can’t spell, punctuate, or put together a reasonably coherent sentence. It… says something about that person to me, and the fact that they either don’t have the technical skills to upgrade to a browser with an inbuilt spell-checker, or they just don’t care when all those little red lines or squiggles appear under every other word doesn’t fill me with confidence vis a vis their ability to be able to contribute usefully to a discussion.
Perhaps it’s just me, but I put “Typing on Messageboards” at the “simpler” end of the “Technical Shit” scale. So, if someone who is trying to give advice on something that’s further along that scale in difficulty or complexity, I’m going to question the practicality or accuracy of their advice/suggestions wen tehyv tipd it liek this lolololrofflecopter Shift+one.
Now, they may be the world authority on making your own fountain pen nibs, but if they communicate like a 14 year old CounterStrike player on his fourth Red Bull of the evening, then most people just aren’t going to take them seriously. That’s just how it is, I’m afraid.
I just don’t see it as any different from doctors’ notoriously illegible handwriting, or some brilliant scientists’ inability to tell you anything about politics, pop culture, etc. People have different strengths and weaknesses. I’m gonna listen to a guy who’s rebuilt 40 different VW engines and can’t spell “motor” over a guy who crosses his Ts and dots his Is and is getting all his information off Google, every single time.
Well, you can certainly divide the two words that way if you want to. Practically speaking, using fewer for countable items and less for uncountables is a relatively recent practice dating back to the 18th century or so. The two words are interchangeable.
It’s interesting that you use the word “blinders,” as part of the reason I don’t read unpunctuated posts is concern for the state of my eyesight.
e e cummings, whatever his worth as a poet, does not post on this message board, as has been noted. And if anyone cares to post his poems here for our reading pleasure, I’ll pass.
I’m more than willing to take the chance of missing some piece of life-altering wisdom that might appear on the SDMB without punctuation. I’m confident that the people who have something important to convey will have the consideration to punctuate and capitalize.
I don’t read doctors’ for entertainment or education, either. Poor little me, with my blinders on.
I do see a difference. Re the nerdy scientist–s/he may not know who Britney Spears is (of which I’m envious), but they can tell you about their ignorance quite clearly.
Being one of those people who has to decipher doctor’s handwriting, I can tell you that it is used only to convey info in a chart or record (or Rx). Maybe all the docs I know are secretly handwriting novels at home in their copious spare time and All Will Be Revealed, but the language used in charts is not quite English. Some might call it jargon; it’s a combo of Latin phrases, abbreviations and conventionally recognized word order to document events and a pt’s status. That’s it. It’s fragmented jibberish to someone who can’t “read” it.
Now, if said doc writes down directions for you in his (or her) illegible handwriting, you may not be able to read it, but it will be coherent grammatically(although this is no longer universally true. There are fewer and fewer docs whom I would consider to be well rounded, liberal arts types, but I digress).
Spelling is a skill that seems spotty no matter the amount of education one has. I am slightly more forgiving of some errors than I used to be. But herein hangs a dilemma: if someone writes “their” but meant “there” or “they’re”, I don’t read that as a spelling error–I read that as incorrect usage. Same with loose and lose and it’s and its.
I actually somewhat agree with your main point (which is --if I read it correctly–that someone can be highly skilled as an accountant or mechanic or pastry chef and still not be able to construct sentences acceptable to us grammar snobs). There are such people. Such people are rare. Most people write online like they talk. We are very lazy speakers (ask any foreigner trying to learn our language) because we rely on visual clues, voice tone, gestures, slang etc to convey meaning. We are much more tolerant of lazy speech. Writing is completely different. Frankly, I don’t want a mechanic or pastry chef(or President) that can’t identify noun and verb and match them up. The lack of punctuation is even worse. Forget esoteric debates re semi colon or dashes, I’d be happy with simple commas and periods. And I think one ought to go to school for special exclamation point and ellipse training.
And this was exactly why my shop teacher made us write papers! He felt it wasn’t good enough to watch and listen and duplicate a wooden gumball machine step by step, but we should know how to do it, and how to use machinery, *and *be able to articulate that to others in writing. Someone has to write all those woodworking books, after all!
It’s not even that they can’t. Read post #70. Some people just literally don’t want to. There are also disorders that are probably more common than you think that make you perfectly able to think a grammatically and punctually correct sentence and perfectly unable to write it. I’ve had incredibly intelligent college professors like that. I would be very offended on their behalf if someone just assumed they were stupid because of arbitrary trifles in the construction of their text, rather than the content of it.
I’m a chemist/chemical engineer. That’s a field where typos kill, so we got “be careful with your spelling” drilled in about as often as “wear your protective equipment.”
A teacher told us about one of his students having an article rejected because he’d spelled pyridine with 3 is (it’s piridina in Spanish) several times. This was before word processors and spellcheckers. The referee said that he couldn’t trust that someone who couldn’t pay attention to the spelling of his solvent would have been paying proper attention while running his experiments. It was an outright rejection, not a “please correct and send back.” Due to the rules of the game, the article could not be submitted anywhere else - 5 years of work and no publication out of it because of bad spelling.
I currently work as a consultant; one of the things I’ve had to do is teach spelling to coworkers whose documents were being rejected by the client on grounds of “what language is this in?” And these coworkers didn’t have the excuse of having to use a second language.
Cisco, it is quite easy to tell the difference between someone who’s made a mistake because he doesn’t know the correct form (foreigner), because people make mistakes, because of a medical problem (dyslexia for example) or because he just doesn’t give a shit. I have no gripe with the first two, I do have a gripe with myself for the third, and the fourth one is the one that makes me wonder whether that person is as careless when using his solvent as when writing about it.
No, it isn’t always. I understand your profession is the exception, and for perfectly understandable reasons, but that leaves message boards as the rule, IMO.
Anybody ever read any unedited writings of the American Founding Fathers, by the way? Their spelling and grammar was wildly inconsistent. Lucky for us it didn’t matter, huh?
Her profession is NOT an exception. Medicine, business, customer service, ordering inventory etc–spelling matters in all types of fields, even auto mechanics or plumbing or other so called blue collar areas.
Spelling and language evolve over time. Accepted usage and spelling are hotly debated topics in any era. The FF would not have come across as too lazy to be arsed to do it “right” because their intelligence would be apparent*. i <heart> u u hawt 4 me has no intelligent thrust behind it.
*As is the intelligence of frontier woodsman who have left diaries etc.
I think message boards should be *second *on the list, after “writing books”. It’s almost entirely a written media. A plumber might be able to get by with stock numbers and enough writing to make an estimate, but on a message board, if you can’t write, if you can’t communicate, you can’t rightly be said to be using the message board for its intended use, can’t you?
If you can’t communicate, then no, you are not using the message board for its intended use. The difference is that failure to capitalize, and failure to use proper spelling and grammar is not failure to communicate. I guess if you refuse to read it, it’s not effectively communicating, but I can’t imagine why anyone would be so snobby and elitist. That’s the reader’s problem, not the writer’s.
Looks like a few people have beaten me to the punch.
I am an English major and it makes a difference to me – if I see a commercial on TV where they use “less” when they should be using “fewer,” I am less inclined to buy their products, which means they sell fewer units.
If capitalization, spelling and grammar are not being followed in an adequate manner, communication will be muddied. If that poor writing so puts off some readers that they can’t or wont try to penetrate it, then the communication has failed. I don’t think that’s snobby or elitist, but rather a simple reality of dealing with sloppy or incompetent writing.
Here’s the part I’m not getting, Cisco: where does “snobby” and “elitist” come into it? I’m starting to feel like those are current buzzwords that mean something I don’t understand from their dictionary definitions.
It’s just harder, physically and mentally, to read and understand the instructions for the bike thingy the way they were originally written. It took me a good 5 minutes to parse it well enough to be able to rewrite it with better flow and grammar. If I was working on the bike, it’d be that much extra time to be sure I understood exactly what he was telling me to do. Do I start with the lighter fluid? When to I get the metal part out of where?
I’d just vastly prefer to read a post like yours. Takes me no time and little effort to understand what you’re trying to communicate. I am fundamentally a lazy person, therefore I prefer posters and message boards who make it easy for me, like you and the vast majority of the SDMB. It’s not about being elitist, it’s about being annoyed when I have to work at it!
That’s all this thread is about: personal preference. You and the SDMB have ruined - “spoiled”, if you prefer - me for other forums, because I expect them to be as easy to read as this one. Mostly, they’re not.
