Dismiss me for this @jannert: There there, not sure what they’re on but the form from form from Forms Ltd formed the template they’re using for their beige to form from thereon. With me by the way it's your and you're—my fingers run these out incorrectly by default. And often.
Some grammar mistakes I can ignore, others drive me nuts. My biggest pet peeve is when people have blatantly misspelled words in their posts (all across the internet). Sometimes, I start thinking that I must be the only person that's using a computer that puts a REALLY BIG RED LINE under a misspelled word. To me, it's just laziness. I won't bother pointing out the mistake but I will think dark thoughts about the person. As a side note .... I installed Grammarly software on my system the other day. Pretty nifty little thing. But what really surprised me is that it picked up mistakes in my WIP that I had missed in regards to British / American English. I use Google Docs for most of my writing and it seems that I've been spelling lots of words the way the British do instead of the American way. It's not that one is better than the other but I should, at least, be consistent. ps. Grammarly helped me with three missing commas in this post alone.
I may take a look at Grammarly. Though I view commas in fiction as my playthings. I put them in or leave them out where I feel like it
I teach English for a living to non-native speakers, so I spend my days listening to non-standard grammar and reading non-standard texts. It doesn't bother me in the slightest providing I can understand what my students are trying to communicate. I always tell them that - right off the bat in the first class - unless you're studying for an official exam, nobody cares if you make 'mistakes' so long as people understand you. Language is about communication not rules. Even more so given that English has no regulating organization (unlike many other languages) but only a body of academic work that reflects its use. Having said that, I do agree with @doggiedude about misspelled words and the big red line. When it comes to writing fiction, I am more judgemental (shoot me down in flames!). I find it hard to understand why a budding writer wouldn't embrace the craft aspects of writing as much as the creative. You wouldn't find a painter who couldn't talk knowledgeably about brushes, or a musician about their instrument, or a sculptor about chisels, so why do so many writers appear to not enjoy/not value/be scared of grammar. It's just a tool, isn't it? You learn it, you internalize it, and then you don't have to think about it consciously any more, much like any other aspect of writing (unless you're editing, which is a different case altogether). So anyway. thinking [that] i am. yesses. wordy words make play, make good story. Tell me a good [one] [two] [many] I want to be able to write like @matwoolf. I am practising.
@jannert and @Tenderiser - mine is typing Christ and Chris. As I sometimes mention God in emails and such, I inevitably tell my friends they should trust in Chris
Oh often I think it's just people don't have the good habit of rereading what it is they wrote, and then they're too lazy to hit the Edit button
Frippery the phoenix flamed over the horizon, threatened good peoples of planet Earth. I drew my bow as far as cheek might stretch and released catapult, arrow true and unstoppable plunged deep into the flames of Frippery. She crashed through skies, burned toward extinction, fizzed. Lake waters engulfed her meteor heart, umm, hmm
I added a spell check plugin to FireFox and then turned it off after a few days because it was so annoying. If your only posting on a forum or some social network then i really dont see why bad spelling and grammar matters.
Because it forms bad habits. Do it often enough and you start forgetting correct spelling and grammar. Besides, as a writer, more or less, it should naturally bother you when something isn't spelt or written right. When I see that I've made some obvious mistake, I always have to hit the edit button because the mistake embarrasses me - I should know better. You should take a certain pride in writing well if you want to be a writer, after all, no matter what you're writing. Also, as a writer, it shouldn't be much effort to write correctly really. Like, it would take more effort for me to deliberately misspell something than for me to simply write the way I'm supposed to write, you know?
I agree that it does form bad habits. Even in speaking, my country mouse comes out as my college kids like to point out. "Mom it's a refrigerator, not an ice box" "Mom it's a four wheeler not a foewilla" "Mom it's ask not ax" It's laughable! Sometimes I don't even notice it until one of them mentions it and they notice it more when they've been away from home for a while. But.....the bane of my existence is autocorrect on my cellphone and my happy trigger finger that hits that enter button before I re-read what my phone has decided I have written.
Actually its "People who consistently point out grammar errors..." Why yes, yes I did ;-) "Constantly" means doing so every second of every day.
Oh, I can relate to that. Grrrr. As a transplanted Yank living in Scotland I get my pronunciation verbally corrected a lot. It doesn't bother me if I'm mispronouncing a Scottish place name or something like that—in fact, I'm grateful to be set straight. (Kingussie, Strathaven, Milngavie, etc.) But DAMN it sure grinds my butt when my American pronunciation of ordinary words gets corrected. I think that's really rude, actually, and I've stopped being nice about it. My accent is perfectly correct where I come from, and I see no reason to pretend to be somebody I'm not. Not long ago, I had a teacher friend correct me when I said something my upcoming schedule. I said 'sked-jool, like any good Yank would, and she promptly corrected me. It's shed-yool. When are you going to learn to say things correctly over here? I'm not usually this quick, but I snapped back: Spoken like a shool-teacher. That shut her up!
'Skedule' is very non-u, as bad as 'toilet.' Them is the rools, yank - see also 'issew' and 'serviette,' o mi gott.
I do agree with you here. Let's just make note of the white elephant in the room, shall we, and point out that when Americans make note of British pronunciations, to us it's just a different pronunciation to what we use, but when our friends across the pond make note of American pronunciations, there is a strong tendency for them to mean "sub-standard pronunciation", which I find rather ethnocentric. On that note, and to lighten it, when I was TDY at Chicksands RAF in Bedford, one of the young RAF sergeants with whom I worked had the most atrocious pronunciation of Russian I'd ever heard.* Amongst his idiosyncrasies was a complete inability to pronounce the Russian letter "x" which he simply rendered as a "k" (totally wrong). We were great friends, honestly, and for every comment he made on my American accent I had one for his godawful Russian pronunciation. We were like Ant & Dec, us. *We were both military interpreters.
