I often produce documents intended for the public that are the product of many writers. Everyone on the team takes responsibility for correcting everyone’s errors. That introduces its own problems when there are principled disagreements about what is right. I once had to change a misspelling in the title of a document that was repeated hundreds of times in the text. No one had noticed although, to be fair, the spelling was the preferred one in British English.
grabs John’s lastname and bonks him with it
I see more and more errors of that type in materials which are supposed to be professionally edited, such as newspapers and books (including textbooks). Reading material which is badly written is not going to improve the reader’s own writing.
Re: correcting this kind of errors and others, often it’s part of my job. While “proofreader” isn’t officially a job position in consulting teams, I’ve had several managers who named one or more after figuring out who were the best writers. We’ll edit for grammar, clarity and nitpicky formatting.
Of course, not all errors are the product of ignorance. Some are typos or other inadvertent errors where the person really does know better.
I think that’s an astute observation, and it gets to the heart of why good writing matters.
The inference one can make about someone whose writing is so poor that it’s hard to understand is that they lack education in the broadest possible meaning of the word – not just formal education, but the kind of education that arises from natural curiosity, the kind that motivates us to read and inform ourselves about the world. So bad writing just intrinsically lacks credibility, a rather serious drawback if one is trying to argue and persuade. It betrays the writer as some combination of lazy, careless, uneducated, incurious, and uninformed. And it demonstrates either ignorance of the fact that poor writing is hard to understand, or the lack of any concern about that fact: better that the unfortunate reader should struggle to understand their bad writing than that they should make the effort to be understandable.
And of course poor writers are usually dismissive of such criticism, regarding their critics as mere pedants. Their attitude to criticism can be summed up as follows: “lol who care’s your a moran”. But in the partnership between writer and reader, it betrays them as rudely unconcerned with the burden they place on the reader to try to understand what they’re saying, forcing each reader to become a sort of unwilling cryptographer, painstakingly deciphering nonsense that they already suspect isn’t going to be worth the effort.
Yes, it’s annoying, but on the scale of bad writing it’s fairly far down on the scale of badness. It’s the kind of word substitution that can easily happen by accident, and for those who do it habitually, it’s easy to set them straight.
“Could of/would of”, on the other hand, in my view is usually an indicator of chronically bad writing. It’s barely “writing” at all, more like a phonetic transcription, the literary equivalent of grunting.
Once is a typo, but three times in one post is ignorance. And it happens all the time on this board.
I’ve come to see it as an indicator of the likelihood someone is about to drop an irregardless or botch a your/you’re or there/their/they’re or then/than. What really drives me nuts is when I correct someone and they respond with ‘whatever’, like their illiteracy is MY problem.
Fortunately I keep this meme handy–I post it and get on with my life.
To me it appears to be a form of H-dropping which has always been used in a classist context, including the hyper-correction and H-adding. As an example the improper but perceived upper-class sounding of (h)erb /hɜːb/ or even H /aitch/ itself.
In the above example, consider the following.
“That could have been me.”
“That could ave been me.”
I do try to empathize with prescriptive grammarians. As I personally do not prescribe to the prescriptive approach; I am curious why the assumption in the thread seems to focus on the contraction hypothesis rather than the age old H elision.