Writing styles

goose wrote: Peter wrote: No, you're not the only one. I believe, that due in part to the internet (chat rooms, email, etc.), standard writing ability is declining overall. (Some of the very worst writing I see on this forum comes from English-speaking countries, BTW. Here at the college where I teach, I routinely encounter highschool graduates who, despite their diplomas, cannot seem to write a single coherent sentence. Generally, people who don't read recreationally are poor writers.) People often seem to think that such things as spelling, capitalization, paragraphing and punctuation "don't matter," but very poor, sloppy writing can make the writer look unintelligent, and it will stop me, for example, from reading such a review through, or from taking a post/poster seriously. A recent new thread that attacked Genesis as "overrated" was a classic example of this. The numerous spelling and punctuation errors immediately led me to conclude that the poster was immature and woefully inarticulate at best, and an irritating little troll at worst. In short, his writing style (if not his actual words) quickly convinced me that he was someone to ignore. Communication skills (written and spoken) are VERY important, and are becoming more so, in our modern knowledge-based economy. Effective communicators get ahead, and communication is key to the well-being of ANY relationship -- work, personal, etc. It is curious how detrimental writing using computers is to grammar and spelling, given how vitally important each is to writing code. I can very much empathise with difficulty in taking people seriously; it's generally an excellent way of telling spam apart from email from real companies (although the gap is shrinking all the time )

It's not so much the computer per se (a word processor is an excellent writing tool, and better in many ways than a typewriter), but the internet shorthand/"webspeak" that comes in via chatrooms, email, etc. (Using "U" for you, "alot" for a lot, etc.)

Yes goose -- poor writing/spelling is often (but not always) an indication of spam or a scam.

Still, I routinely see mistakes in the advertising of even big companies. This seems to be more and more common in recent years.

I trhink it is not only a question of writing skills or education not well integrated, but also the voluntary will to say "who cares?" or WTF! And of course sheer lazyness

I type with one finger, the one on my left hand being used just for upper case or control buttons

Ans when that feft hand is busy (supporting my head or scratching the privates), then,the hell with the upper cases. I am also guilty of not always re-reading some of my posts and sometimes even not correcting some errors if I spotted them after clicking the post reply button

More than the upper cases missing is the downright poor spelling of some native English speakers that astound me. I am far from perfect, I started English at the age of 13, but started writing it only fluently at the age of 16.

I am actually fairly pissed off of some of the write styles because English is a very easy language to get a good grip upon. It is the main reason why it is a dominent language. Compared to English , French (my mother tongue) is so much harder with rules, exceptions to the rules and exceptions to the exceptions that confirms the original rule (not always either). If I write English fairly correctly (few spelling mistakes) and after a first read over, only the sentence structures can still be a problem, in French, even after three read overs, I still spot mistakes.

hoogivesash*tanywayright?

If you believe computer is destroying the abbility to write in propper English, you can't imagine what it's doing to Spanish:

• Nobody knows where and when to place an accent, some people write in high case to avoid using accents. When I was a kid I had to know by memory all the rules.
• A lot of people has forgotten the letter Ñ (eñe) sounds almost like "NI", but if I'm not wrong it's exclusive of our language, in Portugese it's used as (NH) (Ronaldinho) and in Italian it's written GN (Lasagna).
• People write questions with interrogation symbol only at the end of a phrase, when in Spanish it's also used at the beginning (¿?) The same happens with exclamation marks (¡!).

Kids don't worry abou their ortography, they know that a good thesaurus will replace learning the rules, but Thesaurus is not useful to correct grammar faults.

Last week I corrected some tests from he University and this kids used computer short hand like TKiero instead of Te quiero (I LUV U instead of I love you)

I'm the only teacher that takes points for bad grammar because I believe  a good lawyer has to write correctly.

Iván