Study Sez Txt Msgs Make Kidz Gr8 Spellrz 375
Picknz writes "The Telegraph reports that researchers have found texting can improve literacy among pupils by giving them extra exposure to word composition outside the school day. According to the report, the association between spelling and text messaging may be explained by the 'highly phonetic nature' of the abbreviations used by children and the alphabetic awareness required for successfully decoding the words. 'It is also possible that textism use adds value because of the indirect way in which mobile phone use may be increasing children's exposure to print outside of school,' says the report. 'We are now starting to see consistent evidence that children's use of text message abbreviations has a positive impact on their spelling skills,' adds Professor Claire Wood. 'There is no evidence that children's language play when using mobile phones is damaging literacy development.'"
Writing (Score:5, Interesting)
I work on several writing projects involving technology. A really fascinating study showed that when you ask most kids if they write for fun, most of them will say no. If you then ask them how many text / email / IM / blog / etc., nearly everyone will answer in the affirmative. Teens don't see these kinds of things as "writing". Once you sort of get through to them that it is, it's like a lightbulb turns on in their heads, and they suddenly start getting engaged in English.
In other words, while it's really easy to mock texting (tweets especially annoy me), I think that if modern teachers learn to take advantage of all the writing teens are actually doing, we could see a revolution in English skills.
Re:Writing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Writing (Score:5, Funny)
It's certainly an under-appreciated art being able to fit a concise, well-developed argument into 140 characters, including a link and a bun
What do delicious baked goods have to do with anything?
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Based on the number of mistakes with "then/than", "lose/loose", etc, I see from younger journalists and bloggers, I think spelling in general is getting worse, not better. I find it somewhat jarring when I actually see "lose" us
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That's one of the wonderful results of all those Instant-On-services.
Never in history have so many people written so much and read that many lines of text on a regular base. Which is a good sign.
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Re:Writing (Score:5, Insightful)
Way worse! Especially the last decade, many people don't even know that "then" and "than" are different words, that "ironic" doesn't mean "odd or coincidental", and how about expressions like "for all intensive purposes"? And don't get me started on "orientate"...
TFA is nonsense, written by an uneducated fool.
Re:Writing (Score:5, Funny)
It's a doggy dog world...
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Viola!
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Also people writing "would of won" or "couldn't they of been more considerate?" and so on and so on... You can't throw a preposition randomly into a verb phrase...
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...especially the last decade, many people don't even know that "then" and "than" are different words...
I know "then" and "than" are different words. I know the meanings of "there," "they're" and "their." Same with "through" and "threw." And yet sometimes I type the wrong one, presumably because I associate the sound of the word with what I'm typing. Having sinned myself, I try to cut people a little slack (though I also try to proofread what I write.)
I blame Alanis Morissette for the confusion around irony. I hadn't heard "for all intensive purposes", but I'm not shocked. People use all sorts of expres
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The problem here is that, until the last decade, most people just didn't write. Historically, writing was actually something reserved for the "intellectually elite". Most people didn't go to college and write books or anything you might read (i.e. anything outside private correspondence). Instead, they worked in factories, contruction, etc., and if you mentioned 'then' v 'than' in a bar they'd throw you out for your "2 dollar words".
a
So now you have all of the people in the would that "could care less" a
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In fact, I would argue that there is more communication coming from people of below average writing skills, and using technology that is
Re:Writing (Score:5, Insightful)
Way worse! Especially the last decade, many people don't even know that "then" and "than" are different words, that "ironic" doesn't mean "odd or coincidental", and how about expressions like "for all intensive purposes"? And don't get me started on "orientate"... TFA is nonsense, written by an uneducated fool.
This comment is a perfect example of why we study things that are "conventional wisdom". The above poster has already made up his mind that kids today are poorer spellers due to this "newfangled communication technology" because of conventional wisdom. However the study referenced in the article showed the exact opposite correlation. Kids that were given cellphones did better than kids in the control group who weren't given cell phones.
If the study had shown that the kids with cellphones did worse I'm sure the above poster and others would have been whining about "Why do we need to test this? Everyone knows it's true already!" It's sad that the above poster can't accept evidence contrary to his world view and that there are enough moderators out there to think this is "+5 Insightful". I suspect I need to get off their lawn.
Re:Writing (Score:5, Informative)
orientate is valid, it's British English (though often considered incorrect in the US)
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/orientate [reference.com] - variant of orient.
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why is it a problem, though? how often does the transposition of 'then' and 'than' produce actual ambiguity in communication? the same goes for orient and orientate. likewise for "intensive purposes" and other phrases having fixed meaning, at least insofar as they are used in a casual (non-didactic) context.
i think the reason you perceive things as having 'been better' because in the past is less of the population was actually committing thought to the written word. that they are now can only be to our mut
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I think you mean "for all intents and purposes". You probably don't understand things because you don't even know what it is you're not understanding.
I know subtle nuances get lost online. I truly hope this is one of those cases.
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The GP referred to "for all intensive purposes" because he sees that phrase, and HE knows the writer means "for all intents and purposes", but the writer does not.
You failed to think even for a moment about what the GP said, so you jumped to an erroneous conclusion. I believe that kind of shallow thinking drives most of the poorly written online communication.
I avoid grandiloquent phrasing whenever possible, because it doesn't add any value, and phrases like "for all intents and purposes" are usu
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"TFA is nonsense, written by an uneducated fool." I can only assume that people who can't see past common spelling/grammar mistakes must have comprehension skills similar to those found in a compiler.
It's fine to extend yourself into editor mode for people who are new to the language, but what a joy it is to trade ideas with people and not have glaring errors break the flow of thought or worse, entirely confuse it.
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what difference do your spelling skills make if you use the wrong fucking word?
that defin*A*tely irks the shit out of me.
the misuse of to/too/two, their/they're/there, etc is the result of using sounds to spell words.. they all sound the same, therefore..
According to the report, the association between spelling and text messaging may be explained by the “highly phonetic nature” of the abbreviations used by children and the alphabetic awareness required for successfully decoding the words.
"Highly
Re:Writing (Score:5, Funny)
If you then ask them how many text / email / IM / blog / etc., nearly everyone will answer in the affirmative
-Billy, how many texts do you send each day?
-Absolutely!
I call horseshit (Score:5, Interesting)
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I was in a school that was taught word recognition and completely ignored phonetics. While that made for decent spelling, it also caused most of the students to be completely incapable of pronouncing any word they hadn't heard someone else say.
I'm STILL trying to get past the damage that caused.
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> This is how language evolves.
Or devolves.
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> This is how language evolves.
Or devolves.
Or maybe just volves.
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Re:I call horseshit (Score:5, Interesting)
On the flip side, I am now trying to learn sign language, and our teacher once told us that deaf people never make spelling mistakes, probably because they don't have the "phonetic bias". They just learn how a word should be written, with no connection to how it sounds. For them 'ph' and 'f' are entirely different and they never mix them up.
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Your teacher lied to you.
Deaf people have notoriously bad spelling. Case in point, here is a link to a "Yahoo Answers" question asking whether people thought deaf university students should be given leeway with spelling and grammar, when even foreign language students are not:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090702074259AAKDeM3 [yahoo.com]
NASA research into sub-vocalization showed that even deaf people sub-vocalize - that is they twitch muscles related to the words they are reading. Those deaf people who
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I learned to read phonetically and I am one of the best spellers I know. You have to couple it with a great deal of reading (at least that worked in my case) because you need to train your brain with the shapes of the words as they are intended to be written. That gives you a set of patterns to use in later recognition as a fitness function to evaluate spelling. In order to abbreviate words well, you need to have some idea of the phonetics involved so that you can construct a short word which adequately res
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English needs to be fixed. The language is a nightmare to spell in, none of the rules apply 100%, etc.
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I remember thinking....oh, that's nice.
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I haven't had to worry about spelling since I was in grade school. Since then spell checkers have done my spelling for me. I can't be the only one. I can't think of an occasion where I would be using written text without using a computer. If this were true, then I would also assume that the writing would have to be in longhand, and trust me, my handwriting is much worse than my spelling.
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One of the problems with education is that there's a lot of stuff being passed off as re
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You need to read more.
Reading is key to spelling. Read, read, read, read. Read 6 or 7 books a week. Reading Slashdot doesn't count.
That is the very best way to become a good speller.
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In most of the world's languages, the spelling of a word can almost always be correctly derived from the sound alone and vice versa.
???
Are you talking about French? I am sure there are other examples as well. I am a Hebrew speaker and I can tell you there is the same problem in Hebrew, as well, even if to a somewhat lesser degree. The thing is, that languages evolve (or whatever you want to call it) over time. That means that two letter (or letter combinations) that once sounded differently now sound the same. In Hebrew you have Tet [wikipedia.org] and Taf [wikipedia.org] which both sound nowadays like T, but originally the former was a T and the latter a Th.
Once thos
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Since I admit I am also not familiar with many other languages, I do not know if the "most" is correct or not. Both of us gave anecdotal evidence... which is usually enough by /. standards :)
Regarding Hebrew: the fact that it has been resurrected, is a fact that many say helped it retain many of its ancient characteristics, and is why it is easy for a modern Hebrew-speaker to read ancient writings (most notably, the Bible). In contrast, try to read Shakespeare sometime.This "suspended animation" that the He
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laughter, manslaughter, man's laughter: all 3 should logically have a similar sound but do not
Actually, laughter and "man's laughter" rhyme completely. Your beef is between slaughter and laughter, but the difference between manslaughter and "man's laughter" has engendered many a man's laughter over the years. Why remove such a rich source of wordplay from a language?
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pain, lane, feign: again, same sound different spelling
Not to be nitpicky, but in standard American English again does not fit with that patter, it's pronounced roughly similar to the ending of mountain.
Not that I'm griping too much, because your post is spot on. It's really not that much more work to get people to recognize which homophone it is just because you collapse the spellings down to something reasonable.
Sure. (Score:4, Interesting)
"may be"
"possible"
Interesting. It's also possible that injecting people with heroin helps them stay away from drugs. And may be beating children with baseball bats gives them a wonderful childhood. Who knows?
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"may be" "possible"
That's just science speak, the same as how "Theory of Gravity" doesn't really mean that gravity is a nebulous theory concocted by some dude high on drugs. This study is based on a sample of the world's population, so there is a chance that there results aren't globally true. A scientist who claims "this IS true" without sampling each and every person in the world would be lying to you. However, it shouldn't be read as "we pulled these ideas out of our asses."
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It's also possible that injecting people with heroin helps them stay away from drugs.
Interestingly, the Swiss have discovered that injecting long-time heroin addicts with inexpensive prescription heroin is a pretty good way to get them off heroin, and to make their lives manageable until they get off heroin. The program has been so successful that several other countries have adopted it.
Great spellers, but what about proper grammar? (Score:2)
Anybody who texts should of known this already. Texting is not only addicting but educational!
Ebonics != Language (Score:4, Interesting)
This is like saying Ebonics is a language.
So now, all our great works will be reduced to 140 characters with no caps, no punctuation, and hacked up spelling. ee cummings was way ahead of his time.
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This is like saying Ebonics is a language.
So now, all our great works will be reduced to 140 characters with no caps, no punctuation, and hacked up spelling. ee cummings was way ahead of his time.
I'd say if something allows communication between two or more individuals, it's a language. Or are you referring to the language/dialect distinction?
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Perhaps, but Ebonics is considered a subset of English and not a language in its own right.
Re:Ebonics != Language (Score:4, Informative)
Ebonics is people too stupid to learn their native language, so they just mumble some shit and then when they're told to learn english if they want a job, they cry and claim it's a "language" and that it's "racist" to not support it.
No. "Ebonics" was a bunch of teachers wanting to get dialect classified as a language, so they could then teach English as a second language. The idea is this: Students whose native language is Spanish come to American schools with many of the same handicaps as people who have grown up only speaking African-American dialect. The difference is that the states and the federal government provide additional funds for English as a Second Language (ESL) classes, but they don't provide any additional funding to help the black students, even though they consistently perform poorly in English classes. By getting Ebonics classified as a language, the teachers hoped to win some of the same additional funding that teachers who teach English to Latino students get.
Unfortunately, nobody outside the Bay Area seems to understand this, and so Ebonics in the rest of America remains just a touchstone to allow racist assholes like you feel good about yourselves.
Statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
And yet the rate of instances in which I want to punch these texting douchebags repeatedly in the face is trending upwards.
I must be an awesome speller (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I must be an awesome speller (Score:5, Funny)
My spelli~1 must be great, becaus~1 I lived throug~1 the 8.3 DOS filena~1 days.
Fixed that for you
Macro Expansion (Score:2)
That, and... (Score:2)
...abstinence education may help curb teen pregnancies. Just ain't so.
English, itself, is broken (Score:2)
We should change the spelling of words in our language so that they have (and keep) a connection with the pronounciation of said words.
Convention over configuration, but for our language.
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Tat is tru. Bat du ju sink eniwon will understend or bi ebl tu riid it if ju wrot it hau it is pronaunzd?
We learned for the longest time how to write English with its rather weird way of noting down what sounds completely different, changing that now might cause more problems than it would solve. Believe me, as a German who usually writes EXACTLY how it's pronounced, with a few exceptions, English sure was an odd written language to learn... but it's still WAY closer to its pronunciation than French will ev
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> Believe me, as a German who usually writes
> EXACTLY how it's pronounced, with a few
> exceptions, English sure was an odd written
> language to learn..
My opinion stems from my experience of learning dutch. Which is very similar to German. It was kind of an 'eureka' moment for me: a combination of the lax grammar from English and the spelling from dutch (or German).
The dutch correct their spelling every year. Then they increase the complexity of the grammar to help placitate the grammar nazis.
Re:English, itself, is broken (Score:5, Insightful)
And again, at the danger of being redundant, I can't see why it ain't more popular with the French.
Maybe because it would have to be held at a university level, I dunno...
But on topic: There's a danger associated with changing the writing system. Germany had such a reform a few years ago. Now, you might know, German is written pretty close to its pronunciation. So we're not talking about a ground shaking, language uprooting change here. A few words were made simpler, a few ss - ß rules were revised to make them more logic and less arbitrary, the "Ph" in some foreign words were changed to F (so now you write "fotografieren" and "Fantasie" instead of "photgraphieren" und "Phantasie", thankfully they spared us "Füsik", it's still Physik. At least to my knowledge and it's gonna be a very cold day in hell before I write Füsik! Ok, I mean aside of this example ...).
So as you might see, minor changes. Even if you don't follow the change, you will still be able to read everything.
The outcry! Insane! Damaging our language! Dumbing down our language! Whole newspaper staff refused to follow the new language system and (some to this date) continue to write in the "old" system. Schools are in disarray, some German states followed the new system, some clinged to the old one, and of course kids now learn two different forms of writing which, while not mutually crippling, would lead to good students suddenly making a lot of grave spelling mistakes were they to move to another state and write their tests there.
Now imagine a much more invasive revision of the English language that you would have to coordinate not in a single country (ok, in the case of German it was three countries that were affected but afaik the Swiss said from the start that they don't give half a shit about it), but with four very important native speaking countries, quite a few former colonial countries where English is still a formal, official language and of course with pretty much every other country on this globe with English being the de facto lingua franca.
I don't think anyone really dares to touch that with a mile long pole.
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I hadn't heard of this story out of Germany and it definitely makes sense to me. Language is more deeply cherished than people realise, it's perhaps one of the strongest bonds between people and their parents, grandparents, ancestors. Parents start teaching their children to communicate before they're even out of diapers. Having the government intrude into this deeply personal relationship just seems like a small minded bureaucrat tryi
As a parent (Score:2)
you probably can't be more proud than the day when you find out your kid is a 1337 73xx70r...
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Umm (Score:2)
I give you...Facebook. A veritable cornucopia of evidence.
Depends on language (Score:4, Interesting)
Playing with the language (Score:2)
Remember those Dr. Seuss books? And how he played with words to find his rhymes? Text messages seem to work on a similar level. Shortening messages by using homonymous and homophonic letters and even numbers seem to do the same for our kids.
It can work adversely too. For me, it sure did sometimes with the English language (being no native speaker). I often learn words by tracing its root and then building on it. Which led me to write appearantly instead of apparently (since appear, i.e. "how something appea
Daily demonstration this isn't true. (Score:2)
But is this due to texting? (Score:5, Interesting)
Young people will always be be young people. And old people will always be old people. One set has learned the rules of society and knowns that they exist to make things go smooth and the other does not. Young people also live in a world centered on them. They go to a school system that is all about them, are raised by parents who care for them, watch TV that is aimed at them. Surely the world must be about them!
Well no. The full world, the world of adults is actually not about kids at all. Simple test, unless you are a parent or young, when are the school holidays in your region? Don't know? You did know when you were a kid. You will know when you are a parent. In fact in those circumstances the summer holiday is the center of your world. For the rest of adults? Sometime in the summer, maybe.
Kids when dealing with the non-kid world find themselves suddenly surrounded by adults that really just don't fucking want to deal with them. Random adult X is not your mommy. So on such forums, people are not willing to first put the child at ease, deal with their temper tantrums or fragile ego's. The kid is not used to have to deal with people not at its beg and call and voila, the age gap is there. But this one has "always" been there, or at least since the modern child hood was invented by the Victorians.
The generation gap is not just spelling. It is the simple attitude that has a teen first day on a temp job go to the sound system and put on his music... he just doesn't get that the pecking order changes from school to the workfloor. Oh some young kiddies will now protest, showing just how young and kidlike they are in the process.
The people posting on your forums just haven't learned yet that if you want to interact with other people it helps to follow the common unspoken rules. But this is their age and selfcenteredness, not their spelling skills at work. Plenty of older people who are self-centered start a forum post with "HELP please" in the subject, forcing anyone to open the post to see what the actual problem is... bad spelling? No, just not being able to do the mental work that other people have their own lives and so if you want their help you ought to make that as smooth a process as possible.
Just watch the number of people here who don't use the subject box to announce the content of their post making it more work to determine if its worth to open it if it hasn't been modded up yet.
As people grow up, and this is more then gaining years, they learn that other people have their own lives and that by communicating effectively, they can have favors done more easily because ultimately it is less work. Kids don't just have the social skills yet. That is why they are kids.
A simple example? I use paragraphs to make the text easier to read. Because I want YOU to read my posts, so I make it easy to do so. Read slashdot and see if you can find posts that are just one big block of text. Clearly such posters did NOT consider their audience capability to read the post comfortably. Not out of malice, just that knowing other people are human beings with their own feelings is not something that comes naturally to the young or self-centered.
Phonetics (Score:2)
Although it's easiest to learn to speak English and the reason for this is the limited number of sounds - the last I read was 33 in the language. What drives people nuts is how screwy our rules of spelling and grammar are as they are derived from multiple sources, such as Welsh, Latin, French, German, Norman/Saxon and god only knows where else.
What I would like to see is people forget the damn spelling rules and simply spell words as the sound as that allows people to concentrate on getting ideas across ins
making your own language (Score:4, Interesting)
If a generation Z kid tries to communicate with me in their language I simply won't understand them. I do understand that their language serves a purpose in terms of manual data compression. As another poster pointed out you could just have the phone translate it into English after it has been transmitted. Yet it does isolate them from the rest of the world who doesn't speak their language. I highly doubt it helps their English skills in any way because what they are practicing is not English.
I doubt that text messaging in txt language is in itself enough to make a good speller into a bad speller, but you are not going to find that out in a 10 week study. I think the argument is that children are getting too much of the wrong kind of language practice. They are getting a huge amount of practice in a language which does not exist outside of their group. It may be true that the txters who are poor spellers may have been poor spellers even without mommy's cell phone, and it's not like they would have had any writing practice outside of school anyway. But the txt spelling is constantly being reinforced. It would be very surprising indeed if this had no repercussions whatsoever outside of cell phone use.
I personally believe that spelling is not the problem. Nowadays nearly everything written is written on a computer and computers have spell checkers. It's like being able to do mathematics in your head versus needing a calculator. Technology has made English spelling into a skill that is borderline archaic. And the fact that English is so absurdly non-phonetic also cannot be ignored. Maybe the language should gradually be changed to be spelled more like Spanish for instance. That would be moving in the direction of logic and progress. Txt language moves in exactly the opposite direction toward greater complexity in spelling. It is even more difficult to learn. Aside from the unnecessarily complicated spelling, the English language is one of the easiest in the world to learn. I have little doubt that that is the most important reason that it has replaced French as the international language, even though French is a much more beautiful language.
I think the biggest problem with all the txting is that the 140 character limit in nearly all of their communication may encourage a short attention span when it comes to reading, listening, and maybe all forms of communication. Yes, it encourages brevity/conciseness as well, but at the expense of genuine literacy. It is simply not possible to communicate complex and subtle concepts in less than 140 characters. If you zone out any time a "wall of text" exceeds a few sentences you are going to have a lot of trouble understanding complex and subtle ideas. And if you limit your outgoing communications to no more than a few sentences at a time you are going to severely limit the complexity and subtlety of ideas that you can express. Eventually this laziness, lack of patience, and expectation that all information be received in easily digestible little pieces can become habitual and you won't realize that anything is wrong with the way you are processing information.
What happened to reading? (Score:2)
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Sentence fragment!
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It is grammar Nazis and spelling Nazis that really turn people off on English and writting.
You argument must be flawed because it has spelling mistakes or some of the grammar is off. Type of thinking has put many smart people into avoiding academic methodology in their lives. As they are just a bunch of closed minded dipwads.
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I don't grammar Nazi far too often anymore. The only time when I do is when I am having an absolutely difficult time trying to decipher the gibberish that someone had written. Poo poo on "grammar Nazi's" all you want, but they do sometimes have a valid reason. Wouldn't it be better if people could actually convey their messages in a fashion that people can actually read?
On the other hand nit-picking about every little infraction is downright annoying. Minor punctuation and spelling mistakes here or there sh
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Type of thinking has put many smart people into avoiding academic methodology in their lives. As they are just a bunch of closed minded dipwads.
The first sentence above is flawed, and made me read it twice before I understood what you meant, because you left off "This" at the beginning of the sentence. That only took a fraction of a second, but it was still jarring. The awkward phrasing of the second sentence above, and the use of an ad hominem, non-descriptive slang pejorative gives the impression that either you are not well educated, or didn't care enough about what you were writing to use common grammar and descriptive words.
In this case, it
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Not really.
People who do not communicate effectively are naturally less likely to be taken seriously in a written argument. Bad writing of any kind seriously distracts from the point you are trying to make, making your communication (and argument) weaker. I can usually get around it just fine, but there are still a number of cases where I can't stand to read someone's post simply because they couldn't bother to use any punctuation, or they decided that their entire post should be one big, run-on sentence.
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Not if you read the subject line as part of his/her complete sentence.
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Sure, now if we could just get the little darlings to find the "Shift" key occasionally and maybe toss in a period or comma now and again ...
Oh, please, no! Txtspk serves a purpose, but please not 1337!
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My wife teaches sixth grade science, and she has seen a remarkable decline in the spelling abilities of her students in the eight years she has been teaching. Older teachers say the same thing: as texting became prolific, spelling errors increased dramatically. Studies be damned, when you look at what kids are actually doing in school, they seem to think that what they write in SMS messages is acceptable English for school assignments.
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And the teachers her students had in first through fifth grades are all bad, too?
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I really shouldn't feed the trolls...
She's a science teacher. Beside that, SIXTH GRADE. If they can't spell and follow grammar rules by sixth grade, no one teacher is going to correct the problem.
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Re:Grammar Nazis (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll ignore the multiple spelling/grammar/punctuation flaws in your post for the sake of making my point.
You are Cwix, slashdot member #1671282. That is all I know about you, aside from what you write. Much of the internet is this way, though admittedly Facebook and texting imply some previous, and likely real-life relationship as well. Since the only further information others know about you is based on the content of your posts, the lack of proofreading and spellcheck running implies that accurately expressing yourself isn't valued. For the ladies, it's akin to wearing mismatched clothes or a wrinkled dress when going to a bar.
How you say what you say is just as important as the message you're trying to convey. This is why grammar nazis like myself make it a point to express ourselves accurately. Sometimes it's expressed condescendingly, and I think that THAT is a problem (since it obviously doesn't help much), but summarily knocking the desire to express one's self accurately is shortsighted.
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I'm not knocking your desire to express yourself properly. I'm knocking the desire to correct other people.
Re:Grammar Nazis (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, you do. Because if you look illiterate in your posts, many people will assume you're illiterate. Or stupid.
Either of which means that they'll ignore anything you say as incoherent rambling.
Note, by the way, that you used "your" repeatedly in your post. In all the cases you used it, it should have been "you're"....
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"your"???
You do realize that poor grammar makes you sound juvenile and uneducated. We are not talking about lack of proof-reading. The "your" example in your posting, above, is a perfect example. It is not that you misspelled a word, or made a typo, you just don't know the difference between "your" and "you're"!
I am the first to admit that I am a horrible speller. But I know the correct words to use.... a spell checker can fix one, but it cannot fix the other. :)
Re: (Score:2)
It's not just that it makes him look stupid, it makes him look arrogant and thoughtless. Reading is a pattern-matching activity. When you encounter incorrect word use, you have to backtrack, try homophones and so on, and then continue once you've found a match that is semantically valid.
Slashdot has about two million registered members, and each article receives a few hundred posts. At a conservative estimate, each post here will be read by a thousand people. If you can't be bothered to spend a few s
Re: (Score:2)
spell checker,
a computer program for checking the spelling of words in an electronic document. Also called spelling checker.
[1980-85]
Re: (Score:2)
Oh please. Don't tell me you and your friends didn't have a "secret" language when you were young. Pig latin, anyone? B-Language (dunno if that works in English too, but I guess you know what I mean)? It's not like the phenomenon of "secret code", only legible to insiders, is new.
Still, so far nothing rolled over into our adult live or if, at best to crack a joke every so often. And while I have a few friends who might say LOL, mostly in situations where a polite snicker would have been appropriate in the t