How important is good spelling?

by sleepy 15 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Nathan Natas

  I think spelling is important.

  I'm not a touch typist, and I sometimes "fat finger" the keyboard or lose the home position, so I use the "edit" function often to try to clean up the mistakes.

  When I read a post with lots of spelling errors, I tend to dismiss whatever the person is saying. I think I'm not fixated on perfection - at least I hope not. I know that typos happen to the best of us and that a slip of the finger does not indicate a weak mind... I think its a matter of respect for your audience - if we were meeting together physically, say for an "Apostate Leadership Conference" to plan our next massive attack on the Watchtower Society, I wouldn't arrive in my bathrobe - unless the meeting was at the Chicago Playboy Mansion - and even then, it would be a NEW bathrobe.

  Am I a jerk? I leave it to you, dear reader, to decide...
• 

  larc

  I am pretty good at grammar and sentence structure, but I am not a good speller, even though I write a lot. When I write on my word processor, I always use spell check. When I post here, I use webtv, which does not have a spell check for posting, and I know I make many spelling errors. If I am writing an especially important post, I will ask my wife to check it. She is a very good speller.

  I also read through each of my posts, at least twice before sending, to make sure I haven't made obvious errors.
• 

  Francois

  Spelling and punctuation is very important in making and keeping a favorable impression of your intelligence. I tend to discount a person's opinion if it is obvious from their grammar and spelling that they are careless or uninformed.

  I sometimes make spelling errors, as we all do, when we're on bulletin boards. I guess it's a little less formal, but I don't think it should be. Especially so in some of the more intense intellectual disagreements that occur on this site.

  What really drives me wild is the misuse of homonyms - words that sound the same but which mean different things. The worst one on EVERY bulletin board I've ever been on is "your" used for "you are."
  It is more common than picnic ants.

  YOUR is a possessive pronoun. This is your shirt?
  YOU ARE, contracted as YOU'RE is something else altogether. You're going to wear that shirt?

  I'd say that in about 95% of the cases on this or any other bb, YOUR is used when the writer really means YOU'RE.

  If everyone would practice saying out loud YOU ARE every time they type YOUR, we'd see much less of this common error.

  Others are: there for their and vice-versa, and to for too.

  I think spelling should be rethunk, um, thought.

  Consider: If bough spells bow, then cough should spell cow.

  And how about words like muscle, and scissors? What's that C for? And I refuse to go into a bar that has a neon sign advertising that it has draught beer. It's DRAFT, damnit.

  And what does GHOTI spell? Well, it spells a word that is pronounced FISH. How, you ask. Well, I'm here to tell you. It's the gh from enough, combined with the o from women, plus the ti from motion. Put 'em all together, and they spell FISH. Got that?

  Francois

  NOTE TO GOVERNING BODY: You've been challenged to a debate, boys. Dont you have ANY balls?
• 

  picosito

  Substandard spelling on a board such as this, while not being a life-or-death matter, can detract from the printed message if the reader is fairly literate. It feels like little roadblocks for the eye to stumble over. Webster's Dictionary can be used as a standard in the US, Oxford in UK, etc. Some languages are very consistent in their correct spelling such as Spanish whether in Spain, Mexico or Argentina, but English has its regional variations such as AUTHORISE in UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc, while it's AUTHORIZE in the US. Items such as "You're" for "You are", "It's" for "It is" (in contrast with the possessive "its" such as in "its color") are standard wherever you go in the English-speaking world, even where English is an important language but not necessarily the language of all the speakers such as in India or Israel.
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  concerned mama

  Important enough, that I wish Simon had put a spell check on this forum. I hope the new version of the board will have it. (please)
• 

  AlanF

  The relative importance of spelling depends on the situation, the writer and the audience. In an informal setting, spelling is relatively less important (this goes for grammar as well). In a formal setting, spelling is extremely important.

  Spelling and grammar on a discussion board have been properly compared to eating habits. If you grab a sandwich and get bread crumbs all over yourself, you ought to have enough self-respect to brush them off before you go out in public. People don't think much of others who go out in public with food all over their clothes and face. It seems to me that they don't think much of themselves, either.

  Bad spelling and grammar come either from a person's not knowing or not caring. Most native readers can quickly figure out which is which, and will assess a writer accordingly. Not knowing can result from not being a native speaker, or from not being educated properly, or from a disability such as dyslexia. I think there's little excuse for a person's remaining uneducated in spelling and grammar, because these days there are plenty of helpful tools to help improve. Not caring is inexcusable. Dashing off a post without checking whether it reads properly indicates that the person is as uncaring about his or her writing as he probably is about slopping food all over himself.

  AlanF