Re: How much does spelling matter
BryanP, I totally agree with you. I cannot stand the u instead of you, r instead of are, and 2 instead of to. I've seen something like that no more than three times in my life, but my patience for it is virtually gone. I'm more lenient about writing lowercase I when it should've been uppercase, but the only reason I let it go is because I do it myself in typos. It's a fairly easy typo to make, but when people do it constantly, it's clear that they either don't know, or don't care, about this very simple rule that most English speakers learn in kindergarten. Other languages like Spanish, for example, don't have this, so that's the only case where I'd truly accept the mistake(s) and not get aggravated about it.
But then you have those people who are spelling Nazis, and not the good kind. I speak from experience here because I had to deal with one of those. Those kind of Nazis aren't afraid to troll E-mail lists and fo
rums, only replying to say that someone needs to learn how to spell check or they're incompetent. I actually defended the guilty ones because I was so tired of the trolling, especially on an informal list, and the only response I got back was, "if you're the only one to join this guy's fan club, so be it and shut up." So now, I defend no-one and stay out of it. I myself never use spell check and will admit that I've made spelling mistakes, without batting an eyebrow, assuming that I have actually been able to see well enough to know what that looks like, which I haven't. I do agree that proper spelling is needed formally, but so long as we're in an informal setting, and I can read what you're saying without going character by character trying to piece it together, I'm probably not going to call you on it, and if I do, it'll be a brief moment in passing outside of a public board.
After high school, I stopped using braille be
cause I was tired of dealing with the Braille Note. AT the time, it wasn't the device itself that was troubling me, it was just inconvenience. I would be using the Braille Note to write word documents which would then have to be transferred to the PC. I would then have to open them on the PC, check them for translation errors which happened occasionally with ambiguous grade II symbols. Ultimately I would E-mail these proofread documents to my teachers. I figure, why not just write them on the PC to begin with? So no transferring and no unnecessary triple checking for translation errors. Well, that all works out fine, but I've given up braille for speech because it's faster. My spelling has worsened a fair bit, and I have to look up words that I was at least fairly confident in before. And let's face it, if you're in college with a laptop or a Braille Note, it's not hard to know what sighted people are going to connect with more. Classmates connect with
a laptop more just because they know what it is, and you can engage in conversation about mainstream computer stuff at least to a point. Professors feel better knowing just how close I am to being like their other students who have laptops, and don't have to accommodate the simplistic, now unstable functions of my Apex. I still can read and write braille adequately, and could use it full time with just a few minutes of breaking back in.
Another thing comes into play here with spelling, is formal vs informal dialect. I know very few people who write decently in an informal setting. I check some of my friends' messages just to see what their writing looks like. I've even done it with professors too. I've seen things that are totally appalling to the point where you can barely tell what they're saying because it's full of stupid informal crap that synths hate, to actually well constructed sentences with the occasional typo. Heck, Jaws now has a huge d
ictionary with the most common informal abbreviations built in, it was either added in Jaws 14 or 15, I can't remember. I still have an old copy of 13 and they aren't there.
Some random examples of weird spelling/grammar things i've seen. Some people only capitalize the word I if it happens at certain points in a sentence, or only put a period in certain spots but will leave the end of a message with no punctuation at all. For me to do that, I would almost have to learn a new informal rule set, and I don't work that way. So most of my informal messages are mainly the same as my formal ones, the only difference being that formal stuff has better grammar and word choice, and obviously no silly typing mistakes.
A funny story about spelling and grammar and then I'll be done. I'm writing this post in an almost zombified state, and since I'm talking about spelling, I might as well spell check even though I normally don't, so yeah my energy
is about spent. Anyway, in seventh grade, we would always take these grammar tests. On Monday, we would receive a packet of thirty words and practice drills. Most of these words were simple, like the difference between their, they're, and there. There were also a lot of just normal words that didn't have multiple spellings, but the big idea in a lot of these drills was to learn basic grammar rules. Well, on Friday we would take a spelling quiz on the words. The teacher would hand out a little story which was about 5 or 6 paragraphs. Thirty words in the story would be crossed out. These thirty words were the words we were supposed to be studying. The teacher would then read the story with the crossed out words filled in. So for example, a sentence might go like this: "Bob and James went outside to play with blank dog." The teacher would then say "Bob and James went outside to play with their dog," and you would have to fill in the correct form of their.
And yeah they weren't normally that simple but for me they weren't hard. However, one thing that was difficult for me, was that instead of filling in the words like the other kids, I just wrote them out on the Braille note in a list. So basically all the teacher would get is a list of words with no paragraphs to go with them. That wasn't a problem, except if one of those words had been at the beginning of a sentence, I was still supposed to capitalize it even though I was just writing out a numbered list of words. The teacher actually thought that because I was blind, that I either didn't understand the concept of, or didn't know how to capitalize. She was quite nice about it too. At first I thought she was just trying to be nice to me like everyone else, but then I realized she really didn't know better at the time. So I made sure to capitalize right from then on for those spelling tests.
Okay, I'm much overdue for sleep tonight! Lol
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