is it too much to ask that we all watch our spelling and punctuation before we post?

I admit, that I have been guilty of this on a few occassions. Nevertheless, I try to proofread my writing prior to posting.

While it's true that we are not writing for work, or school, and for some of us English is not our first language. Neverthless,even so, presuming, that if we want what we write to be taken seriously,  I encourage everyone who doesn't do so all ready to proofread your work prior to posting. Even with the absence of a spell checker it only takes a minute to do so.

Again, if English is not your first language, it's understandable that you might not be fluent in the proper spelling of certain words. The rest of us I think should be more carefull, and yes, I did proofread this  prior to  posting.

occassions is spelled occasions

carefull is spelled careful

Neverthless is spelled nevertheless

Shouldn't the first sentence be started with a capital "I"?

In the third paragraph, second sentence what is up with all the commas?  "Neverthless,even so, presuming,...." what the hell does that mean?  Also in that paragraph, the usage of "all ready" in that context should be spelled "already".


I'm not sure if you're putting us on, but if not remember the saying; "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones".



-- Modified on 10/30/2003 9:55:44 AM

-- Modified on 10/30/2003 10:01:26 AM

to the time the writer spent in composing the article.

BTW, not all members are ready to admit that English is not their first language.

"While it's true..."  You should remember to diagram all sentences before posting them on an internet discussion board.

Now that I have removed my foot from my mouth, or removed my head from my ass,(your choice)I admit what I said may have been out of line. However, it seems that some just seem to haphazardly through their posts together with little, if any, regard  for spelling. I wrote the post out of frustration, and I end up doing what I complained of.
Oh well, live and learn.

I thought you were going to say by the number of cups of coffee they had that day.

oh whel? mi messtake!

Bear

& others who have provide 10 or more.   how about stop worry about punctuation and book some appt. & tell us the story.  i think it's more important to see a detailed and truefully review than picking on people's spelling& ect.  
Hate English and English teachers with passion, (excluding the ones who escorts)
Sorry, Dante had to cut u with his Sparda.

I had been meaning to make the same point and glad to see caharmon stick his neck out.  Occasional spelling errors don't bother me so much, but misusing 'their'/'there' and especially 'your'/you're' is just plain ignorant.  I even saw a post recently saying 'I seen Mary last night...'   Yikes.  It is my observation that providers have much better grammar and spelling than the guys.

I know of a few people who are not typing on a computer, but on a webtv device and it skips letters, and is a real pain to operate.

I think 99% of people think faster than they can type which would explain a lot of the misspellings and errors.  As long as the gist of the message is there, the spellings problems sometimes reveal how passionate someone is about what they r riting about LOL

LapDawg,
I'm with you, I also , edited that post , but you were more critical than I !!

What does that second line mean ?????

with commas, periods and such, and starting with capital letters. And reviews written in all caps are just impossible to read.

Since this is all fantasy anyway , it wouldn't be bad for us all to try a little harder to improve our creative writing, which includes grammar, spelling and the like.

Point well taken.

Yu kin allwheys yuse da edict feeture wit da postt ta kerrekt it!

THAT IS proof that despite facts on websites where ladies write they like to see 'high' class gentlemens , they end up with 'lower class' , but hey..that is gain....'lower class ' with bad english are much better lovers than corporate guys with bald heads...just joke , no offense .
In every joke there is truth .

I clearly hit a nerve for which I extend my apology. However, at least one person appears to agree wuth me.

In any event I fail to see how having only one posted review is relevant to the topic at hand.

I presume the text of your post was written in jest. If not, this is a prime example of my frustration, and the reason I raised the issue in the first place.

The only thing I see incorrect is the word "Through" which should have been spelled "Throw". Otherwise, I see nothing wrong, and the sentence speaks for itself.

-- Modified on 10/30/2003 3:00:34 PM

message board typing can not and should not be the same as the familiar type of text you read in newsprint or a book:  cleanly formatted, uniform, punctuated, text blocks ... the difference has to do with the display medium, paper vs. monitor (more on this later) ... proper spelling is nice of course, but good luck having that happen!

and as much respect as i have for the Queen's English or barring that, American English [cough] -- i actually prefer that people type in vernacular -- as in "coupla", "kinda" "gonna" etc ... it gives your otherwise disembodied words a living essence or flavour [sic] or "tone of voice" (in tech-speak, "prosody") which is sometimes so critically lacking in people's messages (and so often leads to so needless misunderstandings and flame wars on msg boards) ... sorry, but i'm afraid it takes a REAL writer to convey subtleties and nuances of meaning with nothing but plain ordinary machine-typed text (alas precious few people here have that talent, but it's ok, this is after all TER and not The Paris Review!)

as for lack of capitalization (of which i'm certainly guilty) i've said this before:  if like me you suffer from RSI (tendenitis, carpal tunnel or thoracic outlet syndrome, etc) then captialization (mixed use of the shift key) is very DANGEROUS to your already addled physical health ... i capitalize sparingly and mostly when it's clearly needed (or is easy to do with shift-lock, LIKE WHOLE WORDS OR PHRASES)

--

getting back to typing and text itself, for one thing the sheer density of uniformly punctuated/formatted text is too high to make for easy reading ON A COMPUTER MONITOR!!  that's why you see people space their phrases with several dots [...] as opposed to a single period ... there, and you thought they're trying to be cute!

it is also why some people (the one's who know better) use PARAGRAPHS more than usual (often single sentence ones), cuz it also aids in reading comprehension on a monitor and reduces eye strain ... now, let's give it a little space before we continue, shall we?  

.
.
.

ahhh!  (breathing room)
.
.
.

sometimes when confronted with a very long but interesting post (like MLAM used to deposit here) i would actually PRINT out the message and read it holding the paper in my hand (as opposed to staring up into a monitor)  which is lot less strain on your eye ... your hand-eye coordination feedback loop (in your brain) is much more adept in this situation than when trying to read a display surface (monitor) that you can't control (with small compensating movements) as is the case holding a book or newspaper

most of the time, when i see a message and it's a COMPLETE WALL OF TEXT with no breaks, paragraphs or [...]  -- just one HUGE solitary paragraph ---  i have no choice but to skip it! ... unfortunately this means that there are certain people whose posts i SIMPLY CAN'T and won't read! --- it's made for some awkward PM exchanges in the past: "Hey, did you like my reply to so-n-so in the such-n-such thread?" ... "i saw it, but i didn't read it!"


sorry, but my eyesight is worth more to me than anything anyone could possibly say on a message board


-- Modified on 10/30/2003 4:12:48 PM

Due knot re: lye two much on spell Czech!

I think most fellow write their reviews shortly after seeing a provider.  That being the case, the bloodflow is not quite back to normal.  I call this syndrome "Typing with one's dick"

nuf said

ML

I suspect that the post was not in jest.  I think what the person was trying to say is that the way you contribute value to the body of TER is to participate in the hobby and share your experiences, not by carefully proofreading your discussion posts.

Some of us come here for the interchange of info about providers we may want to see.  Others of us particpate in the boards as a means of developing a community of people in similar circumstances, and that's important because most of us don't have anyone else we can share the experiences of this hobby with.  But most of us don't come here to read commercial-grade literary work, we leave that to our favorite authors.

I'm not trying to put words in Dante's mouth, just trying to reword where I think he was headed in a softer tone.

Nothing personal caharmon, but you have to admit that you really set yourself up on this.  Of all the human traits there are, perhaps none are as distateful to most people as hypocrisy.  It simply grates people at a very base level when you start this thread, and then every single one of your subsequent posts has glaring, obvious typographical or usage errors.

Very few of us have such writing skill that it gives us license to criticize the skills of others, and you most certainly are nowhere near the list that do.  I don't claim to be on that list either, but then, I didn't start the thread.  The guy at the end of the bench who bats .110 and leads the league in strikeouts cannot be the one who stands up in the dugout and tries to rally the players by talking down to them.

No flame intended here, but even your rebuttal replies continue to have sophomoric errors and you should have bailed out much earlier.

-- Modified on 10/30/2003 10:43:36 PM

But there is one thing about caharmon's post I need clarification on.

On your last point; HUH?

-- Modified on 10/30/2003 4:18:22 PM

The "sentence" in question is a dependent clause --- there's no independent clause present.

This sentence "  wrote the post out of frustration, and I end up doing what I complained of." also has a problem.

You started with the past tense, i.e., "wrote", and in the next clause, you switch to the present tense "end-up".  To keep the clauses parallel, you should have made the verb in the second clause also in the past tense.

Others, more extreme, would have an issue with ending a sentence with a preposition, i.e., "of".

A Dreadful Language

         I take it you already know
         Of tough and bough and cough and dough
         Others may stumble, but not you,
         On hiccough, thorough, tough and through;
         Well done! And how you wish perhaps
         To learn of less familiar traps?
         Beware of heard, a dreadful word
         That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
         And dead; it's said like bed, not bead.
         For goodness sake don't call it "deed".
         Watch out for meat and great and threat
         (They rhyme with suite and straight and debt)
         A moth is not a moth in mother,
         Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
         And here is not a match for there
         Nor dear and fear for bear and pear.
         And then there's dose and rose and lose
         Just look them up;  and goose and choose,
         And cork and work and word and sword,
         And do and go and thwart and cart.
         Come, come I've hardly made a start.
         A dreadful language?  Man alive
         I mastered it when I was five.

(sorry, I don't know the author)

At the risk of being flamed for MY poor sentence structure, I want to say that this was one of the funniest strings I've ever read here (although I don't think charmon, omegazap, hootowl and others had humor on their mind when writing).  

Come on!  A group of individuals engaged in (purported) illegal activity writing about the sentence structure and punctuation of the notes they write to each other?  Hilarious!

Oh, by the way, I was so intimidated that I ran this post through the spell check before copying it here.  Hope that makes you happy charmon!

I hate to offend anyone but your grammar, too, is not up to an English professor's requirement. I am a freelance writer, editor and graphic artist during the day. If you post a message about grammar, you need to be more clear in your thoughts on paper, too. Please do not take offense to my post but I have to be honest with you.

Thanks & hugs,
Ci Ci

When I initially wrote this message, my intention was not to offend anyone, far from it. In addition, I never claimed to be a professional writer. However, it just seems to me that some of us (including myself, at times) put little if any care into what we write, primarily in the area of spelling. Speaking for myself, I find it much easier to understand what a person has written if the words are spelled correctly, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof.

For example: on another board on this site, one member writes that he worked for "Boeing". The problem here is that he spelled  "Boeing", "Bowing". I am no genius but I consider myself to be a reasonably intelligent person, and it took me a few minutes to figure out what he meant.

Once again, if I offended anyone, I am very sorry. This was not my intention.

I will think twice before I post anything similar again.

Respectfully

Caharmon.

P.S: For what it is worth, I do use spell and grammar checkers when ever possible.

I'm sure that I as guilty as some others when it comes to less than perfect writing, particularly as I use neither a grammar or spell-checker when posting or writing reviews...plus on those occasions when I self-edit, I'm prone to being a little sloppy in that fucntion & leave in words or phrases that should have been omitted.  

However, I wondered as I read this thread how many of the spelling errors aren't spelling errors at all..but poor typing instead.  Your "Boeing" example is a case in point.  As the *w* is next to the *e* on the keyboard, my guess would "Bowing" was simply a typo.

I frankly don't really care about spelling or grammar errors on this board, only that whatever is written isn't made difficult to read by the lack of any attempt at puncuation or by (a personally favorite) typing the entire post or review in uppercase letters.  I was never an English major, but if you want examples of imperfect usage of the language all you have to do is pick up the average newspaper & you'll find many...particularly the lack of proper usage of adverbs.  These mistakes are being made by people whose professions should require greater expertise in the language than the majority of those who use these boards.

Just a couple of observations...nothing more.

Nicely stated, Singleton. You crack me up!

Hugs,
Ciara