Lazy writing on the forum?

I try as best as possible to ensure that my posts are readable and make sense but I don't agonise over every last punctuation mark or spelling, spelling and grammer Nazis can in my opinion be just as annoying as those seem to vomit forth unreadable "txt spk"

Another large internet forum I'm a part of (nothing to do with writing) has an over-abundance of people who seem to delight in pouncing on every last mis-use of a word or an apostraphe and frankly it gets very tedious.

 

Professional writers work diligently to turn in a manuscript that is as clean and error-free as they can make it. It's not an editor's job to correct punctuation, grammar, and spelling. Editors look for stylistic improvments, or inconsistancies -- ways to make the overall product better.

The manuscript you send to an editor needs to be as perfect as you can make it. If you bought a piece of furniture from a cabinet maker you would expect a well finished product, not something which needed another sanding and polishing. Sure, there may be a few items needing to be touched up on a finished manuscript, but it should be very few.

 

I have started trying to clean up even my posts lately (this thread made me too self conscious, hehe) before posting them, but I can agree with those who thinks that it's enough having to write perfectly in the story. They don't want to put much effort into something that is not supposed to be scrutinized and criticized (man, I had to check the spelling of that word! My brain went blank) but it's just supposed to be a conversational writing. I know for myself I sometimes ignore capitalizing (if that means starting sentences with a capital letter, or am I totally wrong here?), write its instead of it's and i instead of I, but it's just out of good old fashion lazyness and I think that can definitely be forgiven in some occasions, it doesn't mean that I write like that in my MS (absolutely not!!! There, I'm a perfectionist! That's why I take a break when writing on forums like this.) or that I don't care about the written language at all. But for me this is almost like writing an email or a text message (I actually write like this when texting too, no abbreviations of the uncompehensible kind)

 

true editors don't but friends and family do


99% of writer you hear about have their wifes\husbands\freinds
edit it with them
so sorry but a lot of writer are not as good as you think they are

many of them write like this
sure they are beter then me but a 2nd grader is better then me
its a myth that are the good writers are good at grammar and spelling

trust me

 

That doesn't even make sense. Would a carpenter be bad with a hammer? Would a musician be sloppy in his playing? Would a filmmaker not be in the habit of creating the best shots he can?

Words are a writer's tools. If we can't use them well, we can't make a quality product, and no amount of tidying up will be able to hide that. Sure, we might have a few people look over our work for errors we may have missed, but it is not the job of any editor, professional or otherwise, to do half of the work for us.

 

One of my favorite book series was written by an author who is pretty bad. But, I like the concept so much that I continued reading the series, after a handful of books in the series the author finally got better..(I kept reading because I was told ahead of time that the writing got better)

However, she did not get better until she fired her daughters and family from editing her books

2 wrongs don't make a right, and 1 bad writer plus 1 bad family member editor to not make a good story.

 

I write on the forum more of the way I speak.
I try to use proper punctuation. I try to speak properly so I try to write on the forums that way too.

Truth is, I use Word's checker alot.....alot
But also I try to learn from those mistakes too.
Not just make the correction, but try to figure out why. (and it also makes mistakes too)

 

I mean this in good spirits. Do you not find the grammatic errors and sloppy proof reading of your post to defeat the purpose of what you're trying to express?

V.

 

nope! Basically depends on the reader. I have no bother translating what others have written and most people can do the same.

There are better writers on the forum than myself. There are also some who are worse. I read and write in good spirits.

 

Yeah... If the purpose of this thread was to make every non-native English writer stressed before posting, well, it has been certainly achieved.

 

There nowt wrong with your English, luv

Honestly I have 0 bother following your posts. You don't have the runaway ADD quaility mine often have and they are very easy to follow. English has a wonderful quality that even when spoken in a broken form it is often very easy to follow.

 

I got it that his post was directed to the one opening this argument, not to all of us. But maybe im wrong?

Fiction addict: You are so right, hehe. We better get serious now or they will ban us from here!

 

You are right lol guess I made myself a liar I don't pay that much attention.

 

*Exhales breath of relief* Thanks for the encouragement, Elg

Watch out for the witch hunt! *looks back over her shoulders apprehensively* Lol

EDIT: See? I came back to correct a word!!!!!!! How do I unsubscribe to this thread?

 

Hahaha!

 

I one time saw someone quote another poster here, and go out of his way to type the word "sic" into the quote after a misspelled word, like.

It's like, dude, we already know you clicked the "quote" button! You're not transcribing something into a newspaper; you're doing that to be a jerk and it's just making you look like a douchebag. I was pissed.

 

My iPad makes corrections I don't want quite often, sometimes capitalizing random words or completing a word before I finish it and making it a completely different word. It's really annoying, and not easy to go back and fix any errors.
I should really work on getting my computer fixed.

 

To be fair, people might be doing that to be helpful. When at work if I see someone did something the wrong way, I kindly show them the right way, and let them know what they did wrong. Unfortunately, sometimes it can come off as rude if they are unaware of their mistake.

 

A sweet view of things but a line must be drawn. The example Forkfoot raises is perhaps defensible only if the perpetrator regards the effort as a humorous sally. Ff will perhaps be able to recall whether the male - oh yes, I make that assumption - is, on the whole, a jesting and jolly sort.

More often than not, if you are rude, you will come across as rude. And this example of laughable pedantry is so outrageous as to be either the upshot of malignant calculation or emotional pathology, or both.

 

In choosing to be a smelly nappy baby the pedant can be the source of much jolly fun. Just they don't know it!

 

Hadn't thought of that! And perhaps they do know it? Some sort of selfless provider of fun for others.

 

nah in my experience most purveyors of pedantry tend to be the ones that really don't know what they are talking about, and they are the last to realise it.

Use of pedantry, usually indicates that the person is covering up the gaps in their knowledge and convincing themselves of superiority,

There is something wrong and pervese in my brain that when I see someone trying to sound educated, I tend to think woohoo real thicko at six o'clock. Of course that isn't always true and is a predjudice on my part.

As Socrates says a true wise man is aware they know nothing. An ignorant man thinks they know something.

 

That's why you just turn on caps lock, so you don't have to keep pressing shift. Duh!

 

I'm not sure why it matters that you make the assumption that a person is male. We all typically pick a gender to reference as the 'go to gender'. I typically use the male gender. Is it supposed to be insulting that you assume someone is a male? Or, perhaps, are you pointing out that you actually believe him to be a male, instead of just using male as a generic finger-point?

Obviously, I was attempting to say that it's not necessarily what you say, but how you say it. In the case of correcting someone via [sic] in quoting their post, yes I suppose that's hard to see as anything but rude.

I wasn't really approaching that point in specific, but merely pointing out that not all of us who correct are rude. More importantly, those of us who try to correct in a helpful manner typically do so in a calm, jovial way. A simple "I noticed that you did X, I make that mistake all the time, thought I'd help you" is far less demeaning than the passing '[sic]'.

 

That being said, if spelling and grammar is really hard for you, and spending hour upon hour on it doesn't help, I think your time is better spent working on story, descriptions and characterisation, and getting help with the other things from spellcheckers and friends.

There is, after all, such a thing as dyslexia (although I'm not sure how many of those who're called "dyslexic" actually have severe problems, and how many could learn to spell well with some effort).

That's interesting. I believe the opposite - that spelling and grammar are mostly superficial details which can be fixed afterwards, as long as storytelling, characterisation and descriptions are good - but I've never really put it to the test.