🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 18 Feb 2000 at 07:56:15, Oz <Oz@upthorpe.demon.co.uk> wrote in
demon.tech.pc:
(Reference: <VuwQ2XAfsPr4Ewxg@upthorpe.demon.co.uk>)

>Mind you in my day you got heavily marked down for spelling wrongly in 'O' 
>levels but these days (luckily for my kids who have both inherited it) they can 
>get awai wiv bloo merda. 

This seems to be a constant complaint. My German teacher was saying that
they have the same thing - and there are some aspects of German grammar
where an understanding of the background is even more necessary than it
is in English. It always amazes me that in an age when, for the first
time in history, the majority of people are starting to communicate with
large numbers of people in writing [1] the ability to do so clearly and
unambiguously is treated with such disregard.

I am not looking for pedantry, but what wood yew understand me to have
been talking about in this sentence? If you think about it, it is clear
that wood and yew are misspellings, but that isn't obvious at first
sight and my error has wasted your time while you checked it. That is
not a good idea if I want you to read and understand what I am trying to
say.

Oz, you show all the signs of somebody who has to work hard to achieve
any writing at all. As a result, you write far clearly and unambiguously
than almost everyone else I read on usenet. I suspect you read through
everything you have written several times before you post as well. Most
people (including me) seem to send much of their stuff off without a
second glance. This may add an element of spontaneity, but I find the
results, when they come back to me, acutely embarrassing when I have
written them and sometimes profoundly confusing when they come from
others.

(I have just read through that last paragraph and corrected three
mistakes - now for the ones I didn't find that time - this time one
sentence which said what I meant but was grammatical nonsense. Perhaps
someone will tell me about the mistakes I failed to see altogether.)

[1] Before the Internet, how many things written anywhere but a book or
a newspaper were ready by more than three or four people?
-- 
John Underwood