🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Jz84vlFpWqr4EwjI@jsunderwood.demon.co.uk>, John Underwood
<john@jsunderwood.demon.co.uk> writes

>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'm not sure that's entirely true. One reason for the widespread use of
english is that it can be understood despite many errors of
pronunciation, spelling, grammar and (to a lesser extent) parsing. In
other places it's not uncommon for non-english speakers to post with
barely a word properly spelt and with inappropriate nouns and verbs and
don't even talk about tenses. Generally they are replied to without a
comment, perhaps occasionally a query about the use of a technical term.

The same applies to spoken english. Take broad scots (the man with the
net vest whose name just escapes me right now), after the first 10
minutes you can follow and after two episodes you have picked up most of
the jargon. The same applies to singapore english and so on. Talk to a
german or french speaker in their language and you just get a blank look
unless you are VERY close to correct.

>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.

Now that IS also correct. If you want to appear competent and
intelligent then you gotta spell and phrase correctly. This was a
constant battle for me when writing business letters and so on. Luckily
I have a very un-dyslexic wife who tore my efforts up for me (mostly)
before I had sent them. I do wonder how many very competant people never
get the job they deserve because they just don't write properly,
although with modern spellcheckers this is very much less of a problem.

>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. 

You wouldn't want to see my first draft, trust me.
*I* don't want to see my first draft!

>Most
>people (including me) seem to send much of their stuff off without a
>second glance. 

One of the problems with being good at something.

>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 

Yeah right, tell me about it!

>and sometimes profoundly confusing when they come from
>others.

It's the use of the comma. This is not explained at school at all well
(if at all). I have found that the comma is the vital thing for avoiding
ambiguity. If you re-read what you have written and follow your own
punctuation (which is bloody hard) then you will spot where you have
said something ambiguous. Appropriate use of commas fixes this with
ease.

>(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.)

Oh dear. You'll be doing it all the time now.  :-)

I do wish TP3 (W31) had a spellchecker, I ought to switch to agent but
then I'd get careless again.

-- 
Oz