Re: top posting (off-topic)

On Fri, Nov 23, 2007 at 10:48:38AM -0800, David Benfell wrote:
On Fri, 23 Nov 2007 11:31:51 -0500, Bart Silverstrim wrote:

We have adults who can't be bothered to tell the difference
between lose and loose in writing. Wonderful things encouraged by people
justifying their lazy writing styles.

This might be slightly unfair.

A large proportion of the population has *never* been able to spell correctly
or to use proper grammar. A difference between now, and a few years ago, is
that we are more often encountering their expressions in a written form, as
they, too, gain access to the Internet.

I think it's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem: we don't really know for
sure whether TOFU[1] posting spurred much of the rise of illiteracy or
the increase of relative illiteracy on the Internet led to an increase in
TOFU posting. Which came first?

Ultimately, I think greater frequency of TOFU posting and a reduced
average ability to order one's thoughts to compose meaningful discourse
each contribute to the other.


And an insistence on grammatical and spelling correctness is its own form of
elitism.

Is it? In my case, it tends to be a couple of things, neither of which
is particularly elitist as far as I can tell:

1. an attempt to help others learn how to think more clearly and
express themselves more precisely

2. an easy way to filter those who do not think very clearly so I can
spend more of my time on those who do, since better grammar and
spelling (along with certain other communication skills) tends to be
indicative of clearer thought

I won't ignore someone who displays appalling lack of writing capabilities
just because of poor spelling or grammar. I sometimes need to cut down
on how much stuff gets read in a given day, so I have time to do
something with the information I get from my reading, and when the need
is great enough it's usually the people who don't communicate worth a
damn that get cut first.

--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Kent Beck: "I always knew that one day Smalltalk would replace Java. I
just didn't know it would be called Ruby."
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