Rules about grammar on the forums

Apologies in advance if I come across as a Grammar Nazi, but I feel this needs to be pointed out.

From the latest revision to the Forum Rules:

I strongly disagree. There are several times when browsing through the forums that I've encountered instances when a person's bad grammar makes it very hard for me to understand what they're saying - and I'd be very surprised if I'm in the minority on this. Normally at this point I'd propose a rule change requiring precise grammar on the forums, but I'm hesitant to do so, so I'm not making it formal.

What do you guys think about this? Should the grammar rule be revised, or no?

This is Idol Tap. (My Troper Wall)

I see no need to revise our rules on grammar unless one wants to create a 'lot' of work for the mods policing typos and grammatical errors

New theme music also a box

And as you point out, when someone posts so poorly it's hard to understand what they mean, then there's a problem. There's no need to go further because it's impracrical and gatekeeps people who could still contribute to discussions.

Grammar is required on the wiki because a lot of (unregistered) people view them, so they need to look as good as possible. In forums everyone understands posts are individual.

Edited by Amonimus on Feb 18th 2024 at 5:50:58 PM

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

Ironically, your post contains at least two grammatical errors:

• "I'd be very surprised if I'm in the minority" should be "I'd be very surprised if I were in the minority."
• "There are several times... that I've encountered" should be "There have been several times that I've encountered" — although the sentence structure is convoluted enough that even the version with correct agreement is probably not ideal.

The existence of this reply should hopefully indicate why adding this rule would be a bad idea.

Edited by tropette on Feb 21st 2024 at 10:18:09 AM

If you have trouble understanding a post, you can ask for clarification, or just ignore it. It doesn't cause problems in the same way that inserting consistent bad writing into the wiki does.

The mods have enough work as it is without adding to it. I don't think there needs to be any changes.

(Annoyed grunt)

Yeah, if you genuinely can't understand what someone is saying in a conversational setting, you can just ask

Absolute destiny... apeachalypse?

I have literally never seen any sort of forum setting that decided it needed rules on grammar outside of those about posting creative writing. Even then, only in the actual writing itself; go wild everywhere else.

If something is unclear, you can just ask. Kind of the point of having a forum setting in the first place. Obviously, if you're reading a page you might not be able to find who added something and ask them, so they need to be reasonably good to start with.

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Yeah, clearly this was a waste of time. I'm gonna holler for a mod to lock this cuz this was a stupid idea.

This is Idol Tap. (My Troper Wall)