Grammar in posts (Was: What comics did you buy today?)

[colcool007]

Niblet, this is more to allow those prejudices to be vented in a safe way. After all, we may visit many more sites than this one and to see some of the atrocious spelling and downright appalling grammar detracting from what can sometimes be very educational posts is annoying on a personal level. And from the sound of it, it annoys a few others as well. But rather than be accused of starting a flame war, we are putting our views on a thread where we probably set ourselves up as targets when we get it wrong!

[Niblet]

Then the moderator should have started a completely new thread and not singled out one particular forum member for castigation.

[steelclaw]

Nothing worse then a pedantic person pulling you up for your spelling or grammer,
get a life.
I know mines terrible.
I'm with yer big bad bri.

[Raven]

I don't think anyone need be "paranoid", but if it makes people more mindful of how their posts read, it's not too bad a thing. Never-ending sentences in small case with no punctuation are just a real chore to read, and look terrible. But I think people only sounded a tad ruffled, if they did, at Bri's expressed *attitude* in one post, because he said he was "too lazy" to use the shift key - not at him personally.

I don't really see how writing well, and sounding passionate or amusing are in any way mutually exclusive, though. If you want to read passionate prose, read Harlan Ellison's essays - they're all the more effectively passionate *because* they're so well expressed.

[swirlythingy]

Well, since we all seem to have official sanction from the moderators to be relentlessly picky about other people's writing styles, could I take this opportunity to politely request of Phoenix that in future he uses the Return key more often? I'm sure I'm not alone in finding his longer posts extremely difficult to follow due to being split into so few - or more commonly no - paragraphs.

I know perfectly well that my sentences ramble all over the place, sometimes to such an extent that I have to adopt the newspaper custom of putting only one sentence in each paragraph in order to get paragraphs of a sensible size, but the problem would be even worse if I did not use the Preview button as he suggested to judge how readable I have made my prose, and go back and split sentences and break paragraphs accordingly.

The Pedant's Bonus Challenge: Spot the deliberate split infinitive in the above.

[Phoenix]

A polite request is good, and always appreciated.

Regarding the request I referred to in my opening paragraph, I need to point out that I do have an excellent keyboard, probably quite expensive, although, as it was a Christmas present from my younger son a couple of years ago, I wasn't crass enough to ask him how much he had paid for it. It is an MK300 from Logitech, which, regrettably, does not seem to have a Return key, whatever one of those is. If Swirly wishes to further his interest in this matter, he will naturally need to take it up with the company.

With regard to the claim that Swirly makes about finding my longer, paragraph-free posts extremely difficult to follow, I must respond by saying that I don't believe him. This is not to say, of course, that I am somehow averse to the idea of creating a greater number of paragraphs in my posts, if this will help other posters, but Swirly is by no means in need of such assistance. If I were to take a poll of comicsuk members, I can confidently assert that I would have plenty of support, in this matter at least.

A final point, addressing the split-infinitive issue. The current ruling is that split infinitives are acceptable. We must move forward, I suppose, although to what, is a mystery that does not need to concern us tonight.

There you go, Swirly. If you reply, could you use a paragraph or two so that I can see first hand how a post should really be presented.

[Raven]

With regard to the claim that Swirly makes about finding my longer, paragraph-free posts extremely difficult to follow, I must respond by saying that I don't believe him. This is not to say, of course, that I am somehow averse to the idea of creating a greater number of paragraphs in my posts, if this will help other posters, but Swirly is by no means in need of such assistance. If I were to take a poll of comicsuk members, I can confidently assert that I would have plenty of support, in this matter at least.

Actually, Phoenix, Swirly does have a point there, which I've thought myself a few times. Your posts are often packed with very good specialist information that's well worth reading, but great big blocks of unbroken text can be quite a strain to read online, and, when providing a lot of information, breaking it up into paragraphs with a space between would make it much easier. It's just harder to keep your place in a big block. Same with anyone's posts, not just yours.

(The Return - or Enter - key is quite simply the key that takes you onto the next line for you to continue there.)

[AndyB]

Actually, that's not a direction we would want this to go. We don't want to see threads get taken over by nitpicking about anything other than facts regarding the comics - this thread only exists because grammar's an interesting discussion, and it certainly does not belong in a thread about buying comics.

I only quoted bri's post at the beginning because the discussion wouldn't have made sense on its own.

If a specific post has such terrible grammar that it is incomprehensible (see my first post in the thread), then it has to be tackled in the thread, but respectfully. If it is in all caps, we're going to take a dim view. If the grammar and spelling is poor but the point is still made clearly, then please address the point being made - not the way in which it is being presented. That is what is called metadiscussion - discussing the way the subject is being discussed - and is off-topic.

This topic will serve us well if it helps us with our grammar and spelling of things other than DC Thomson. Learn from it, do your best, bear in mind you have some grumpy over-30s in here who get annoyed by grammatical nonsense such as "would have" and "the bell has went", and for goodness sake, keep posting what you think as well as you can, because that's more important than how you say it.

[Phoenix]

Actually, Phoenix, Swirly does have a point there, which I've thought myself a few times. Your posts are often packed with very good specialist information that's well worth reading, but great big blocks of unbroken text can be quite a strain to read online, and, when providing a lot of information, breaking it up into paragraphs with a space between would make it much easier. Same with anyone's posts, not just yours.

I'm not disagreeing with him, Raven. I just don't like him claiming that he has the difficulties he mentions when you only have to read his posts to see how bright he is and how widely read, and he's still only nineteen, unless he's had a birthday very recently.

[Raven]

Oh, I didn't think he meant intellectually difficult to follow - just visually difficult, if it's a big, unbroken paragraph.

I may have misinterpreted, though.

[Phoenix]

Actually, that's not a direction we would want this to go. We don't want to see threads get taken over by nitpicking about anything other than facts regarding the comics - this thread only exists because grammar's an interesting discussion, and it certainly does not belong in a thread about buying comics.

Andy, can I point out to you that none of the points you are making in the quotation above have any validity whatsoever. They would have if this were a thread in any other section, but the non-comics section was set up precisely to allow us to debate anything at all beyond the purview of comics. You say that this thread only exists because grammar's an interesting discussion, and it certainly does not belong in a thread about buying comics. That is not the case. It exists because it is in the non-comics section where you quite properly placed it.

[Phoenix]

(The Return - or Enter - key is quite simply the key that takes you onto the next line for you to continue there.)

I have one of those, and I use it regularly, but not regularly enough, apparently.

I didn't think he meant intellectually difficult to follow - just visually difficult, if it's a big, unbroken paragraph. I may have misinterpreted, though.

Intellectually or visually, I'm sorry but I don't accept that Swirly finds any difficulty whatsoever.

[AndyB]

You say that this thread only exists because grammar's an interesting discussion, and it certainly does not belong in a thread about buying comics. That is not the case. It exists because it is in the non-comics section where you quite properly placed it.

That is not actually correct. It exists because I split three posts off from another thread in another forum where it was off-topic.

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

I joined this fine forum in late 2007: some of you older-TIMERS may have RECALLED a time when I WROTE a lot of my POSTS a lot like THIS.

EVENTUALLY, this method of SPEECH totally disappeared, QUITE NATURALLY.


But looking BACK, it must have appeared pretty OFF-PUTTING at the TIME!

[Phoenix]

That is not actually correct. It exists because I split three posts off from another thread in another forum where it was off-topic.

If I hadn't been aware that you had picked up that it was off topic, Andy, I would not have said it is in the non-comics section where you quite properly placed it. However, I do seem to have assumed that you were objecting to our nitpicking about grammar in the non-comics section, where we are absolutely at liberty to do just that, so I apologise for my careless reading of that section of your post.