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Aswad -> RE: G/grammar (5/26/2007 8:30:06 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: LafayetteLady
If in an email, the person writing to me can't take the time to think out what they are writing and proof for grammar and spelling, it doesn't make a good impression on me.
One might want to bear in mind that dyslexics and those who have English as a second, or even third, language will have more than just a hard time with the proofing. Combine the two, and there is little chance of getting it right at all, particularly with "complicated" words (and one might not make such a good impression writing Simple English either, right?).
Remember that English and the Romance languages (e.g. French) are the only ones who have even remotely similar vowel transliterations as those found in English.
When a person who speaks other PIE-family languages wants to write something like "pace", it might come across as "pais", for instance, which a spell checker would suggest you change to "pays" instead. Hardly an improvement. I have a fairly decent command of the English language for a non-native speaker, and would dare consider myself fluent in it, but not everyone has spent years reading and corresponding in English. One wonders how well the average English speaker would fare in, say, Norwegian?
Dyslexics tend to spell phonetically, which rarely harmonizes well with the transliteration used in English, but can usually be read with very little difficulty (just read it out loud, and it will make sense), provided one does not use a spell-checker. Attempting to proof it without spending minutes on every word poring over a thesarus can be disasterous sometimes, and that may equate to anything from a few hours to a few days on a decent self-introduction.
Hardly worth it to appeal to someone who doesn't have enough interest in what is being said to have a go at reading it.
To me, the coherency and structure of what is being said is far more important than spelling and grammar, and substitutes for such in terms of making a first impression for the simple reason that these actually reflect the person's thinking and personality, rather than a specific skillset that will have no impact on our relationship.
Odd colours and font sizes (or, worse yet, all-uppercase writing) would be a lot more likely to cause me to have a negative impression.
quote:
It comes across as though they are careless. I certainly wouldn't want to be involved in this lifestyle with someone who was careless.
This is a non sequitur: if someone is careless in writing, it does not follow that they are careless in dealing with the health, safety and sanity of another human being, nor that they are careless in their relationships.
One could argue that it could be a sign of general carelessness, expressing itself both in their writing and in their BDSM practices, but without anything other than their writing to go on, there is no reasonable way to infer this, and making the mental connection can even give a false sense of security the other way around (otherwise, the connection would be entirely superfluous).
There are some areas of life in which I am careless- some by habit, some intentionally- but there is a distinct line between being careless about something trivial, and being careless about something important; there is also a very distinct line between being careless about something that affects myself, and only myself, and being careless about something that affects others as well.
Many people have been careless, or even intentionally did things that might lower others' opinions of them, and are still meticulous about matters that concern others directly.
And, again, one could paraphrase Hanlon's Razor to the effect that "Do not attribute to carelessness that which may be adequately explained by lack of proficiency with the written word"...
quote:
Screen names I type as the person has typed them. As for mine, names are proper nouns, and therefore I capitalized it.
This is a convention I also try to follow, including rephrasing if the screen name / username starts out with a lowercase letter and would end up at the start of a phrase. Just a matter of calling people what they call themselves.
As for capitalizing proper nouns, there is a long-standing tradition on computers of spelling screen names ("nicks" / "logins" / "usernames") with all lowercase, although I cannot recall the exact reason for this. It clearly predates the Internet, though, and certainly the Web by years to decades, so it doesn't have anything to do with "cybering" or BDSM-themed chatrooms.
The convention of capitalizing the screen names of Doms, lowercasing the screen names of subs, and capitalizing the last letter of the screen names of switches, makes sense for chat rooms where people don't know each other. For those who follow the convention, it allows a newcomer to the room to identify the orientation of the people in it at the expense of a single letter. Again, nothing to do with "cybering", though.
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