Internet misspelling

You know the story. Capitalization, apostrophes, your and you're, who and whom, or even better, elegant texts such as idk wat u dude r tlkn bout.

These things are supposed to be taught in elementary school. Obviously, they aren't. Do you think the educational system is at fault, or are there other causes?

"Why don't you write books people can read?"-Nora Joyce, to her husband James

I think the main cause, or at least one of the biggest causes, is the desire to save time typing (and proof-reading, which often is completely omitted). That's because the speed of interaction on the internet, even back in the day of low-speed connections, is much higher than in the real world (e.g. compare E-Mail, which usually requires only seconds to reach the recipient, to physical mail, where it takes days).

Remember that a lot of those "acronyms" go back to chat-rooms, where the time constraints are the strongest, and also cell-phone text messages, where the total number of letters is rigidly limited and also the input method is very cumbersome.

edited 26th Nov '10 6:47:58 PM by Herbarius

I'm willing to bet they're taught, nobody cares enough to keep using them though.

Fight smart, not fair.

Who and whom are just plain confusing, and few people use whom in earnest these days. There is, however, NO excuse for your/you're. The amount of communications I've seen with that wrong, even ones that you'd think people would have put thought into like party invitations, annoys the hell out of me.

edited 27th Nov '10 4:08:04 AM by LoniJay

Be not afraid...

Sure there is, not knowing where the apostrophe is.

Fight smart, not fair.

Who and whom is simple, whom is the person something is being done to, who is the person doing it.

That said, I think a lot of internet spelling is down to people overestimating how readable their informal typing style is. It's easier to interpret notes that you have written yourself.

I remember being taught in school - in Germany, so that's a foreign language - that "whom" is kinda old-fashioned and rarely used today, while you'll be fine just using "who" every time.

(On the other hand, it wouldn't be the only thing that particular teacher got wrong...)

To put this into context, another factor for the phenomenon of "Internet misspelling", especially when it comes to English, that there's a lot of people online to which English isn't their native language. In other languages you rarely get that though (because English is defined and established as the World Language)

edited 27th Nov '10 11:57:57 AM by Herbarius

Lots of people say that particular words are too complicated and their own cut down way of speaking is better.

I won't complain about someone not saying Whom, but claiming that it's difficult to use or to understand is silly. It's as simple as "Who shot you?" vs "Whom did you shoot?"

It's not wrong, per se, it's just that most people don't give a damn about proper grammar.

I think I may have used a grand total of two sentences in my entire life where I needed the objective case of who. It's a waste of a word.

As for your/you're, that's something that's easy to forget if you're typing quickly and almost automatically, as most people on message boards do. It's not that big of a deal.

edited 27th Nov '10 12:27:05 PM by Roman

| DA Page | Sketchbook |

I'm studying to be a teacher, and I've spent the last four weeks on work experience. My students' spellings were astonishingly bad. (To be fair, they did ask me if spelling mattered when I did tests. Since I was teaching science, I said that as long as I could understand the word, it was OK.)

Ukrainian Red Cross

Good for you Budda.

Fight smart, not fair.

And that's why doctors have indescipherable writing.

Client:"So, the doctor sent me to this pharmacy to get a medication, he wrote the name here, I think this is it but I can't understand it".
Pharmacist #1:"Hm... hey, look at that from this angle, yeah, looks like it's his the name of the medication..."
Pharmacist #2: "No, fro this angle it looks like a liver. Teddy, you worked with Dr. Bad O Letter, what's this medication supposed to be?".
Pharmacist Teddy: "Sorry guys, that's his signature".

edited 28th Nov '10 6:32:49 PM by SilentReverence

Fanfic Recs orwellianretcon'd: cutlocked for committee or for Google?

I would definitely say it's about saving time in most cases that aren't about non-native English speakers or another thing that I'll cover shortly. I've always tried, from the beginning of my time widely using the internet and IM services, to get all my spelling and grammar right. I was naturally inclined toward it offline, and I saw no reason to change my behavior just because other people on the internet were lazy. I was a slow typer (typist?) to begin with, and this slowed me down even more...I've gotten better over the years, but I still go slower than most of my peers.

Actually, though, as I get faster, I make more mistakes. And while I do my absolute best to correct all of them, it's hard and annoying at times. I mean, I've made a ton of mistakes just in writing this post, that I had to go back and correct!

Most people are too lazy for this correcting, too impatient as well. They place no personal value on proper spelling and grammar (perhaps rooted in a dislike for school), desiring only to say whatever they want as quickly and easily as possible. I've known people like this, some of who (whom? My formal knowledge of grammar isn't actually very good...) are fundamentally decent and some who...er...have a lot to work on. But often they have something in common: a talent that doesn't really require them to be able to write properly. Two examples I have known come straight to mind: one a talented drummer, the other an excellent artist.

I'm getting bored of my own reply here and I don't really know how to end it, so I'm just going to stop now.

Flora Segunda | World Made By Hand | Monster Blood Tattoo ^You should read these series.

How about this for a standard addition to forum software: a spell-check. When you click "Post", your post is run through a spell-check program on the server, and if any errors are found, you get a page similar to the one you get when you hit "Preview", only with all your spelling errors highlighted (and mousing over one can suggest spellings). You're given the option to edit your post to fix the errors, or you can wait a while and post it anyway.

I'd suggest making the delay for posting the version with the errors be proportional to the length of the post and having it be ten times as long as it would take to read the post. Given this post takes me 32 seconds to read, if I'd made any mistakes I'd have to wait 320 seconds to post it without editing it.

Accidental mistakes are forgivable, intentional ones are not.

That seems rather....arbitrary, and a bit of a knee-jerk reaction. You have to bear in mind that, this being the Trope forums, we use a lot of words that aren't covered in spellcheck or are made up on the spot - and yet still make perfect sense to the rest of us, and by our standards, have no errors.

Obviously our version would include all the article titles in Wiki Word form in the dictionary, but in a general case, forcing users to review their spelling before posting would go a long way towards improving the readability of the Internet.

Accidental mistakes are forgivable, intentional ones are not.