Originally posted by CrikeyMagnet
reply to post by FlowThruSpace

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Is this in response to a particular situation? Sounds... personal.

My wife often calls me a grammatical d***head... but it's just because I pick these things out. It bothers me when there are grammatical issues and spelling issues in published materials, because -- at the very least -- everything you're using to write those materials has integrated spell-check and grammar-check abilities. And I tend to be one of those people that will walk into a room and quickly scan every piece of text in the place. (To the point where I will sometimes notice a phrase, then spend the next 5 minutes trying to find where I saw it.)

I won't be the one to tell you that your argument is invalid because you used the wrong [there, their, they're], but if I know you well enough, I may chastise you for it. What bothers me is when someone obviously doesn't care. They're not difficult rules to follow, but they can make all the difference in actually communicating. As for the language being malleable... yes. But not to a ridiculous level. Knowing the rules, and choosing to bend them is very different from not knowing the rules, and being militant about it.

That difference also tends to be really obvious.

Long story short: Agreed. Ish.

Originally posted by Quibbler
reply to post by FlowThruSpace

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If the language is so malleable, then what is the point in bothering with learning the proper spelling and usage of words in the first place? They're just going to get jumbled up in the end by people too incompetent to properly use them.

Originally posted by jiggerj
reply to post by FlowThruSpace

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When people get aggravated from being corrected on what they write, what I hear is, "I don't care how sloppy my writing is, so you just have to put up with it."

Just the opposite, if I make a persistent error in my writing I want to know about it.

Plus, those of us that have been involved in reading and writing over the years have become conditioned to decent form in what we read. It isn't so much that we want to pick someone apart, it's that reading garbage is literally painful. The only way to stop that pain is to inform sloppy writers to stop it! lol

There's a difference between reading something where English is a second language and reading something written by lazy people. I'll forgive the second language, but if lazy writers don't want to put in the time to make their writing legible, why should any of us take the time to read it?

No capital letters, no punctuation, no me.

edit on 2/22/2013 by jiggerj because: (no reason given)