If they correct something relevant they are fine.
No. I also don’t insult people with skills I lack, or assume people who take care in details cannot see the ‘big picture.’
I’ve had to deal with the painful results of imprecise writing a lot, so I have a lot of respect for details.
But that’s the point. She didn’t. You were the one who decided to take it as an insult. She just stated her own observations.
But I will say it. If you nitpick to the point that you miss really big mistakes, there is something wrong. In most cases, little mistakes are not as important as bigger ones. Anybody with half a brain can be taught correct grammar or punctuation. Good writing takes a lot more than that.
It’s the reason I do not have respect for English teachers that punish severely for small mistakes. Said teachers very often squeltch creativity, while rewarding those who spend so much time in proofreading that they didn’t spend that time in writing. I’m 100% certain that such teachers are the reason so many people don’t know how to write nowadays.
I’m sorry if it bothers you, but it is quite rare to have a detail oriented person who is also at the highest level of creativity. It should be obvious: we humans don’t multitask well. Two different types of thinking are two different types of thinking.
That said, nitpicking here doesn’t bother me, if it’s done without insulting the person. If the correction is important, I’ll notice and read it. If not, I’ll just skim on by. It doesn’t hurt anything. What does hurt is if someone were to come into GQ and ask “How do zylophones make sound?” and all we got were people arguing over whether zylophone is spelled correctly, and a few other people pointing out that they don’t make noise on their own.
You want to prove you can do more than nitpick? Do more than nitpick. There’s enough space to do both, I promise.
I have a very different experience. I find lots of examples of multiple errors on the same procedure attributed to operator error; I read the procedure I find something like the procedure says “Repeat three times”, instead of “Perform three times”.
(And those observations were phrased in very unflattering terms.)
Mentioning, in a nice way, the difference between “its” and “it’s” is NOT nitpicking. Neither is mentioning, in a nice way, the dfference between “brakes” and “breaks”. So there!
The only thing worse than people nitpicking are people squabbling over the issue of nitpicking, and the only thing worse than that is this post.
As Liz Lemon once said, “Why would you want to go around being wrong?”
(And in the spirit of this thread, I’m quoting that from memory so if it is incorrect feel free to nitpick)
Agreed! Nitpickers IRL have those narcissistic tendencies that make them terrible conversationalists. YMMV
Where they nitpick on some detail, doesn’t matter what, in every conversation, in essence putting up roadblocks and hijacking the discussion away from the speakers original train/thread of thought.
I’m dealing with an IRL friend who is on my last nerve at the moment because of her insane one track detailed mind.
I love to nitpick, but I’m nothing like how monstro hypothesizes. I’m a big picture person; when I do critiques of writing (usually fiction), I ignore spelling and grammar and deal with issues of story structure, characterization, originality, and how the concept resolves. I’ve written and published science fiction stories and novels, so I think that shoots down “uncreative.”
For me, it’s primarily just showing off. Usually it’s for things like movies, books, TV shows, etc. I’ve been collecting trivia for years and like to show it.
Note that while I nitpick, I don’t think a few trivial mistakes ruin a work. I can point out something wrong about a film (e.g., in the recent Sherlock Holmes movie, they manage to get from the Houses of Parliament to Tower Bridge in less than a minute on foot – the two are at least two miles apart), yet still enjoy it.
I don’t think OP is talking about relevant stuff. Nitpicking is by definition insistence on correcting non-critical or inconsequential details.
For example, this post is totally not nitpicking.
I don’t because I’m not an asshole.
I do because I am.
If you’re going to nitpick, at least provide something to contribute to the thread topic before you leave. I have seen well-done nitpicking. I have also seen nitpicking that is one step below threadshitting, and threadshitters should be made to type “I will not threadshit” 1000x.
Nitpicking is appropriate here because this is the Straight Dope board. We should not give even minor errors of fact a pass. It should be done politely, it should be done as unobtrusively as possible, but it should be done.
I resist the urge to nitpick threads such as these:
*What purpose does the hair on my knuckles serve?
Why would evolution not give me eyes in the back of the head?*
Why did evolution design women so that… blah blah blah?
I feel it is our duty to chime in and correct the use of the words ‘purpose’, ‘design’ and sometimes the actual premise. Invariably, I get beat up for it ("…why does someone have to nitpick…?’), even though it’s required to fight ignorance. So, I actually gave up for a while.
Seriously, fighting ignorance requires repeating one’s self, especially when people just can’t get past square one of some incredibly important theories (such as evolution). That should not be considered nitpicking.
.
I’m going to copy and paste what I said in an earlier thread, because I am too lazy to say this again:
I think what’s really frustrating is when people correct you on things that don’t matter. I agree that we should correct people on what they might think are niggling little details, but actually are pertinent, but I want to draw a distinction between making sure people are aware of a detail they may have dismissed as insignificant, and being a know-it-all.
<snipping junk that makes more sense in context of the thread>
We get into nitpicky knowitallery when the details you’re correcting are truly irrelevant to the overall point. An example: At work, we were discussing a deal which included shit tons of paper work and legal crap. In our (seemingly endless!) discussions, I at one point focused on a specific clause within a certain document, which contained some pretty serious wording that we would have to address. Well I apparently made the fatal error of referring to the document by an ever-so-slightly wrong name. Not a name that could potentially confuse it with another document, mind you and I didn’t misrepresent some “small” detail of the wording, but still not by the exactly correct name. Everyone knew what we were talking about, I very specfically and clearly was discussing the language, and how it would affect how we proceeded, and yet someone still corrected me on the document name. Who gives a shit? The rest of the world addressed the language which is what actually mattered, and she got her internal brownie points for correcting me on the least relevant thing possible.
You just seem like an ass when you do stuff like that.
Some people think it’s more important to be correct than be kind.
Some people think it’s more important to be kind than correct.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. We’re here to fight ignorance, not propagate it. Many people absorb what they read, and it adds to their base of knowledge. It does the world no good if their knowledge is corrupted by crap that is wrong.
It is antithetical to the spirit of the Straight Dope to let an error stand uncorrected.
(aldiboronti again): It should be done politely, it should be done as unobtrusively as possible, but it should be done.
Years ago, when I was a copyeditor of books on home repair and the like, I had a managing editor who was a hopeless nitpicker. Any manuscript he reviewed would look like this: first page totally covered in a red mist of grammatical quirks and pointless rewrites; pages 2-4, the same but less so, gradually tailing off; final pages, more or less blank. Never a hint of thoughtful input about structure, voice, technical accuracy, or any other big-picture issues. He would merely exhaust himself on minor stuff in the first few pages and then quit, satisfied that his point was made and that his educational abuse by nuns in 1960s Catholic school did not go to waste. The technical consultant (who was essentially just the opposite in every way) would inevitably point to the last few pages and say, in mock sincerity, “But you got real good toward the end!”
I had a list of his grammar quirks a page long, and if I anticipated all of them he would just recast sentences as worse sentences, so I ended up leaving his quirks undone so it would give him something to do.
If someone is telling a story and they say “I came home to find my house was robbed” – sorry, that’s just how people talk, and it’s nitpickery to correct them to “burglary” unless this distinction is actually important to the story being told. A story is not a legal document. The adjective “red” does not need its Pantone number next to it in order to be understood properly.
Sometimes, people simply say, “I was robbed!” Without providing more facts. This creates a mental image, in my head anyway, of an actual robbery: someone taking your things with a gun in your face. :eek: A robbery can be a horrible and horrifying thing.
However, no such thing ever occurred; the listener has been inadvertently misled. When it turns out it’s just a burglary, I still feel bad, but not as bad, for the victim because a burglary is much less severe, being only a property crime and not a crime against a person.
If you have to pick from words that have a particular meaning, you should use the right word.
Let’s say a friend comes to you and says, “I was driving my car when the another driver, going 50 MPH, ran a red light and hit me.”
You respond, “Oh, that’s horrible!” :eek:
You start asking questions of your friend to find out more about what happened. It turns out that your friend wasn’t even in the car, nobody was driving, there was no red light, his car was parked, he was sitting in his home, and the “other driver” he mentioned was actually a kid on a skateboard who scratched the car with a key while skating down the sidewalk.
You respond, “:smack:”