I’m not talking about brainfart type mistakes – where you describe the Mona Lisa as Titian’s masterwork, and don’t catch yourself until you’ve posted. Sure, go ahead and post the correction.
Or when you’ve accidentally muddled the sense of what you were saying – the old ‘Thou shalt commit adultery’ type mistake. The follow on “Rats! I meant ‘shalt NOT’ of course” might prevent useless arguments based on the mistake.
Or even – but this is borderline – where you’ve used the wrong homophone and are desperate to make plain that really do know the difference between ‘they’re’ and ‘there.’
I’m talking about mistakes that everybody instantly knows is simply a slip of the typing fingers. Do you really HAVE to do a correction for those?
Most recent case I came across: the first message had a sentence along the lines of ‘This isn’t something I would be cofortable with.’ Followed immediately by a post about how that should have been ‘comfortable with.’
Well, duh. Don’t you think that everyone who read the first message managed to figure out what word you meant all by themself? C’mon.
Not to pick on that particular poster, it’s just that I’ve seen what seems like dozens of similar posts, and all they do is add a useless, content-less post to the thread.
So your thoughts outraced your typing ability, and you skipped a letter/reversed two letters/hit two keys and got an unintended letter added to some word… So long as the meaning isn’t obscured, why not just let it go?
Are you afraid all of Dopedom is pointing at your typo, jumping up and down and snickering at you?
I will only correct my mistakes if they somehow confuse the intent of my post. The sad fact is, if you don’t correct them, often somebody else will. That’s even more annoying. I’ve been on the receiving end of a [sic] somebody has attached when quoting a post of mine.
I’m anal retentive. I’m going to check my mistakes. I’ve been known to quote myself a page later and fix something, or edit a post nearly a week later.
I always thought it was because they figured someone else would call them up on it, so it was better to reveal their mistakes and get it out of the way.
I was going to post a correction to a recent post, concerning my use of ‘lying’ vs ‘laying’. I decided not to because 1, i honestly didnt know which was more appropriate, and 2, was hoping noone would care.
Be honest though, you know very well that there are plenty of people around here that will call you on spelling and or grammatical errors. For those of us that simply can’t bear such ridicule, that’s where the defense mechanism fires and makes us correct.
I think most get over correction posts after a bit. I do know the difference between there, their and they’re, it’s and its, etc., and brain fart’em around anyway. Unless the meaning of a statement is left unclear, I just leave it to the Dopes to sort it out.
I don’t correct for spelling mistakes. I never understood this, either. Most people won’t notice, anyway, and those who do know how spell checking is difficult on the board.
If you post a correction, all those who missed it now know you made a mistake. Why tell them? If they caught it, they know. If they didn’t, it doesn’t affect anything.
It was like when I was in college. I posted a set of rules for DJs to follow. One was “Don’t call attention to any misstakes you make.” That’s because it was common for people to say the wrong thing, and then spend several minutes telling people they screwed up. Whereas, if you just went on, only a few people would catch the error.
The list was up for several months and no one noticed “misstakes” was spelled wrong. Which was exactly my point.
Sorry, I didn’t realize someone else had already started a thread on this subject.
(Though, I point out, that it proves those silly corrections annoy more than just me.)
But as far as doing these corrections to avoid the shame of a nitpicker doing it to us, all we need is to develop a counterattack to shame them for being so anal-retentive about meaningless errata.
So we’d have a sequence like:
Poster 1: I’ve got to run, someone’s at teh door.
Poster 2: Hah-haw! You typed ‘teh’ instead of ‘the’.
Poster 1: Oh, looky, guys! We have a new volunteer to play Miss Thistlebottom!
It’s silly. It slows down the hamsters even further and it accomplishes nothing. I think it’s fairly obvious who the illiterate morons are and who the people who misspell or mistype an occasional word.
Clarifying meaning is a Good Thing but merely correcting a typo isn’t.
Out of sheer morbid curiosity I would like to see the worst spelling (i.e. more than one word in a post) not deliberate, on the SDMB. Anyone got a link?
