Thread: To Spell or not to Spell :-)

Well said stevo68

I fully agree.. seen this happen too much on here..some just don't get it

Camo

Or as a better alternative, how about we just ignore baiting posts and keep on topic... unfortunately if the thread initiator can't keep on topic we have a real problem

Now back on topic please

Originally Posted by stevo68

most people have expressed their opinion's,

Opinions!

Originally Posted by mojo

I agree with alot of the other responses here, I couldn't really care about the odd spelling or grammar error - I'm sure I make plenty of them myself!

But when you get a post that is so badly written that it's a struggle to work out exactly what the person is trying to say, that annoys me. My pet hate is people who jumble a whole post into one big sentance, with a complete lack of commas and/or full stops. Very irritating!

Comas are very over rated and in nearly all modern business colleges in Australia they say to limit its use. I can write a complete sentence and you should still understand what is written with out me telling when to take a short breath indicated by a comma.
Too many people over use comas and they don't need to. It has been a long time misunderstood grammatical error. There you go a complete answer with out the use of comas yet still perfectly legible!

Stevo, forget the fags, have decent Cuban

I'm going to have one for you right now

GQ

Originally Posted by mittadisco

For those who like a pictorial illustration:

Great plagiarism there, but that's O.K. I must not have a human mind because while I could read the text, in evaluation of my speed of reading for 100% comprehension, my speed over that image was significantly slower.

Personally I prefer good spelling, grammar and syntax as it is easy to read quickly and comprehend while poor spelling and the like jump off the page at me and make the whole task a bore.

Call me an anachronistic dinosaur if you want!

Diana

Originally Posted by disco2hse

Actually that is true, and it's not. The statement makes sense because all the letters there, just jumbled up, and the grammar and punctuation are correct. The brain needs certain cues with which to establish its relative meaning and the example simply demonstrates that if one or two of those cues are missing we can still interpret the meaning of the statement - in this case the jumbled up letters represent the missing cue called Correct Spelling.

In the case Stevo cited there is more missing than the one cue, Correct Spelling. The spelling and the grammar were equally munged and there was a random use of punctuation. Together they make the process of understanding that statement very difficult (actually I couldn't be bothered wasting my time trying to understand it - I gave up after the second or third line).

There is nothing that wrong with txting, provided it is used in a context inside of which it can be understood. Indeed there is no such thing as right or wrong spelling, grammar or punctuation, but there are agreed social requirements for what we take as acceptable practice or otherwise - I think this is what most of this discussion has been about, people's differing levels of acceptance.

There is another issue with this. Not every one writes to be understood, just take a look at the graffiti scrawled on buildings. Often I see posts on forums (fora?), not this one thank goodness, in which people are using it to exercise their online version of graffiti, or unreadable garbage that is best consigned to the scroll down bar. I enjoy being able to scan what people have to say and get their meaning. People are interesting, and often they have interesting things to say. But I'm not interested in working hard at trying to decipher unintelligible scrawl.

And for those that say "oh this is sooo boooring". Well, there are other threads.

For a dyslexic like myself grammar means nothing. For us it is 99% reading the beginning and end of the sentence and filling in the blanks. Words and sentences are recognized as shapes and not the letters.
This is why I cannot use a dictionary. I need to be able to spell the word enough to look it up. I use the computer spellers so if they say it is wrong then to me it is wrong.
The UK was the best at teaching how to spell. My tutor used to teach me saying to spell words and I still use it today. In Australia I just got you will loose marks for every spelling mistake. Guess which method soon lost my interest and respect for the teaching system.
I must say thanks to the Australian schooling system for teaching me to teach myself and ignore my teachers though. I still learn that way today. Give me a text book or the answerers and I will discover how to do it by working backwards.

Originally Posted by Lotz-A-Landies

Great plagiarism there, but that's O.K. I must not have a human mind because while I could read the text, in evaluation of my speed of reading for 100% comprehension, my speed over that image was significantly slower.
Diana

That's probably not entirely your fault because according to:
Schriver, Karen in Dynamics in Document Design, page 274:
"When text is set in all capital letters, reading speed is slowed about 13 to 20 percent. Reading speed is optimal when uppercase and lowercase letters are used."

...and the heading is all upper case.

Apparently there is less difference between the shape of upper case letters than there is with lower case, so it takes a bit longer to distinguish letters.

However the claim is not that you can read jumbled letters as easily as correctly spelled words. Even though it says you can read it "without a problem", the point is not that it is easy, but that it is possible.