Just a thought

[Sh4rkyBloke]

Hand's up who couldn't see the inevitability of this thread going the way it has.

* must resist, must resist... *

 

[Panter]

Hay, it was just a thought

 

[Noodley]

Hay, it was just a thought

I agree with your thought. It does get stupid....although there are times, as previously stated, where it can be of benefit most of the time it is just stupid.

 

[Panter]

I suppose Shaun is right though, it can always be reported.

TBH though, I wouldn't report someone doing it, I guess if the person being "picked on" feels sufficently victimised then they can report it themselves.

My thought was triggered by a recent request for help and one of the replies was a sarccy spelling mistake highlight and, to my knowledge, the OP never responded to the thread at all.
Maybe they read the sensible replies, got what they wanted and weren't bothered by the comment but maybe they just thought "sod it" and found another forum.

I do agree, if it's a mistake in a specific product or manufacturer then it's very useful to point it out but it bugs me when someone will have a nasty pop at a spelling mistake when they clearly understand the point being made, otherwise they wouldn't be highlighting it!

I'll climb off my meagre soap box now and go and fettle my bike

 

[John the Monkey]

And it's not the end of the world is it?

No, although when people start using "may" when they should use "might", by golly, it'll be pistols at dawn!

 

[Speicher]

Arch's fourth dot is a full stop.

You see - each pedant can be out-pedanted.





(I'm waiting for someone to spot my deliberate typographical error.)

You have pm!

 

[srw]

You have pm!

That was an error of language, not of typography!

I used a hyphen rather than an em-dash to separate out "You see" from "each" -- and, as you pointed out, it should be "every".

Only real anally retentive types (or people who've used TeX or looked carefully at what word does) would have noticed that one.

On the substance of the matter, I think people who post on a forum owe it to their audience to do the best they can to communicate clearly. That means using conventions of grammar, typography and spelling. Someone who doesn't bother to use capital letters and full stops is less likely to get a considered response than someone who does. I can think of two or three examples....

Dyslexia is an interesting case. I don't know much about it, but my working assumption is that dyslexics are very unlikely to use a forum anyway, and that the errors they make are more likely to be transpositions of letters than the typical spelling howlers (loose/lose; break/brake) cited in this thread.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[summerdays]

No there are definitely dyslexic's using this forum and there are different forms of dyslexia - and I have definitely seen one user (who has owned up to being dyslexic) confuse break/brake and similar.

I'm just someone who finds spelling difficult, and if google suggests a correction I will use it, sometimes I get it bad enough that google doesn't suggest an alternative or gives totally the wrong one. In which case I use the word as I best spell it and hope that it is understandable to others.

Also English may not be the first language of some of the posters on here.

They do have a equal right to post on here and not be mocked.

 

[Archie_tect]

Some of the cleverest people I know can't spell "for toffee"!

...but Uncle Mort can.

 

[Arch]

Same here. Incidentally, Arch, an ellipsis is only three dots, with a space at each end, thus ...

I have a sort of stutter when it comes to ellipses, I always tend to add extra dots, I know ...

I didn't know about the space at each end though, cheers.

 

[Sh4rkyBloke]

I have a sort of stutter when it comes to ellipses, I always tend to add extra dots, I know ...

I didn't know about the space at each end though, cheers.

I didn't know that that was what it was called... much less that there was a "correct" form for it.

Shame on me.

 

[Arch]

I didn't know that that was what it was called... much less that there was a "correct" form for it.

Shame on me.

But you know loads about sharks. We can't all know everything.:?:

 

[Rhythm Thief]

I have a sort of stutter when it comes to ellipses, I always tend to add extra dots, I know ...

I didn't know about the space at each end though, cheers.

Arch's fourth dot is a full stop.

You see - each pedant can be out-pedanted.

As it turns out, you were right and I was wrong.

 

[srw]

As it turns out, you were right and I was wrong.

Or I'm making it up....


Here's a wikipedia quote:

Bringhurst suggests that normally an ellipsis should be spaced fore-and-aft to separate it from the text, but when it combines with other punctuation, the leading space disappears and the other punctuation follows. He provides the following examples: i … j k…. l…, l l, … l m…? n…..!

So we're both right.

 

[661-Pete]

I have a tendency to end paragraphs with a row of dots. I'm not sure whether it's correct to call this usage an 'ellipsis', though. I find it hard to break out of this habit: I know exactly where I picked it up but I'm not telling...

May I suggest that the already-hard-worked moderators will not thank forummers for drawing attention to every single spelling mistake, misplaced apostrophe, split infinitive, or what-have-you?! Certainly I find very poor spelling and grammar wearisome to read, and sometimes it clouds the meaning of the post. In one recent case (a thread about IT support) it was probably right to pull up the OP on grounds of literacy - even though it upset him - in the interests of clarity.

Otherwise: I think it's best to confine on-post corrections to the light-hearted and the humorous. See this one from one of the Astro forums (a thread about the Hubble Space Telescope - my highlighting):

What happened was that a tiny fleck of pain came off the null corrector, and nobody thought to check the accuracy of the null corrector, so they ended up with a flawed mirror.

They thought of everything except human fallibility.

to which I came up with:

Superb typo! But nothing compared to the pain which the NASA guys felt when the mistake was discovered!