Why we are so critical of people who can't spell and punctuate

Fraggle Rocker said:
You're supposed to say, "I'm a novelist. I'm practicing writing in the present tense. It's a technique." :)
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Oh, thank God, I knew things would loosen up. My posts from now on will be written in the style of James Joyce and e.e. cummings. The latter is not a novelist, of course, but door was ajar.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
A member asked, in another subforum, why so many of the responses to his posts focused on his spelling errors rather than his questions.

I think it's because educated people regard writing as almost sacred. Written language was one of the key technologies that is responsible for the advance of civilization. Oral communication has a limited bandwidth and no persistence. What we say can only be heard by a small number of people, and once it's said they have to rely on their memories to retrieve it. They repeat it to others with errors and editorial changes, and by the time a few generations have passed the original knowledge may be lost.

The ephemerality of our speech even makes it difficult for us to think in high levels of complexity. How perfectly can any of us recall the brilliant idea we had yesterday but didn't write down? Writing allowed people like Plato and Euclid to develop entire systems of learning, and it allows us to read their own words.

While older key technologies like agriculture, stonemasonry and perhaps bronze were developed without writing, most of what we take for granted today like electronics could not have been. Astronomy is a bona fide science that predates not only writing but perhaps civilization itself, but physics and chemistry could never have been developed by scientists communicating orally.

So then what must we think of a person who hasn't learned to spell or punctuate correctly--who hasn't mastered written language, a technology that holds the key to all the trappings of modern civilization? Sure, a few people have disorders like dyslexia. But even blind people can write correctly. Even George Bush has never been criticized for his spelling.

This is a forum for scientists and people who are interested in science. Writing was the key to all of modern science. People who haven't mastered the basics of writing are regarded with suspicion. Why haven't they done absolutely whatever it takes to achieve the universal standard minimal level of skill in this most important of technologies?
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because some people dont want to!!

i know my spelling isnt good, and neither is my punctuation but i try, if i notice i have made a mistake i will go and try to correct it. I have word blindness, and somtimes a word looks spelt correctly but actually isnt.
 
Besides - any professional writing intended for publication will be thoroughly edited and proof-read by the publisher. I heard from a publisher that often times a piece will be proof-read over and over again by a line-up of proof readers, passing the item from one to the next. Also, people will hire ghost writers and writing technicians—writing is a serious professional occupation.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
Why haven't they done absolutely whatever it takes to achieve the universal standard minimal level of skill in this most important of technologies?
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lucifers angel said:
Because some people dont want to!!
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That's no answer. That's just a "duh." Obviously we're talking about people who haven't mastered written language because they don't want to, not the unfortunates who lack the intelligence or opportunity.

What makes a person look out at the world and see that written language is the technology that underlies all of civilization, the skill by which all people are judged, the ability that is essential to an ever-larger majority of non-menial jobs, and say, "What the heck, I'd just as soon show the whole human race that I'm just not responsible enough to learn to be good at that"?
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
There are lots and lots of people who just flat do not have the cognitive ability to learn algebra.
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Learning basic algebra is a simple matter of memorization. You can do it even if you don't really understand why it works. Hardly any actual thought is required - you just have to remember a few simply rules on how to set up the problems.
 
Maybe they're just lazy? I know I am.

Only through years of being on forums with tons of grammar-nazis has formed me into the mould of a man who thinks first, "spell well, jackass".

Maybe these guys you speak of just haven't been on long enough.
 
I can spell pretty good but i cannot punctuate. mostly i just guess. i was taken out of school in the fifth grade. i learned from the internet. the main problem is that when i write i cannot make distinctions as to where these:

; : '"

things go. Even when i read paragraphs containing them they do not mean anything to me.
 
Why were you taken out of school?
You learned everything yourself?
Did you not have tutors or anything?
 
John99 said:
I can spell pretty good but i cannot punctuate. mostly i just guess. i was taken out of school in the fifth grade. i learned from the internet.
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Well then that's your problem. :) It's not easy to learn good writing skills from the internet. For one thing, it's an international community, so you're reading things written by people whose command of English ranges from minimal to university scholars. For another, even well-educated native speakers get pretty sloppy on internet forums.

You have mastered the first lesson in punctuation: You know that every sentence must start with a capital letter and end with a period. That puts you ahead of some of our other members.

Today's lesson: The pronoun "I" is always capitalized. No exceptions! That includes the contractions "I'm" and "I've". It's easier to learn things if you get a little background with them. Capitalizing "I" makes English unique among all languages and identifies us anglophones (native speakers of English) as rather rude and self-centered. Many languages do just the opposite and capitalize the word for "you" as a form of politeness.

Work on one thing at a time and start with capitalizing "I".

The next lesson may be the comma. Study this by reading something out loud that was written well--a newspaper article or a novel, not some of our internet junk. Look at the commas and notice that you pause very slightly at the same point in the sentence where you find the comma. The whole purpose of punctuation is to compensate for the fact that spoken language has much more to it than words: pauses, pitch, speed, loudness. All of these features are expressive. We try to make up for the lack of them in writing by using punctuation marks. The comma stands for a little pause between words.

Keep in touch. We'll help. :)
 
John99 said:
I had problems from day one. I peed on the floor and threw my shoes in the garbage can.
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So they kicked you out and never took you back?
No other school would take you either?
Did you have tutors?
Did your parents home school?
 
one_raven said:
So they kicked you out and never took you back?
No other school would take you either?
Did you have tutors?
Did your parents home school?
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I don't think they kick you out of kindergarten. From fifth grade on i did my own thing, that was it, i had had it.
 
In the USA it's virtually impossible for a child to escape government-enforced institutional schooling, even if he lives in the Neolithic regions of Alabama or West Virginia. Up through age 16, or maybe a couple of years younger in the Neolithic. Exceptions are made for tutors, as is common with child entertainers and the occasional unruly rich kid, and for home-schooling. In both cases government monitoring is rather intensive. Things aren't much different in the other Anglophone countries, which don't have Neolithic regions.

This is starting to sound like a work of fiction. I notice John writes to a much higher standard on our other subforums. :)
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
In the USA it's virtually impossible for a child to escape government-enforced institutional schooling, ...
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Oh, com'on, Fraggle, surely you don't really believe that, do you?????

Many kids just quit going to school ..and some have never even been in a school ...and there's virtually nothing that the "government" can do about it. Thousands, perhaps millions, of kids just stop going to school ...and only a few records indicate it ...and virtually nothing is done about it.

That you don't know that is .....frankly, amazing to me! From your posts, I thought you knew everything, and then some. Then you come up with this bullshit.

Baron Max
 
Baron Max said:
Many kids just quit going to school ..and some have never even been in a school ...and there's virtually nothing that the "government" can do about it. Thousands, perhaps millions, of kids just stop going to school ...and only a few records indicate it ...and virtually nothing is done about it.
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Max, I said "virtually" impossible. In a land of three hundred million people, "thousands" is a credible estimate, even "tens of thousands." You say "perhaps millions," which implies at least many hundreds of thousands. I'm willing to grant the possibility of a tenth of a percent of the population--300,000 people who managed to drop out of school before age 16 and got away with it. I think that qualifies as "virtually impossible" and puts our estimates close enough not to bicker. It also explains why I've never met one, why my wife who was a social worker for half of her life never had that on her agenda, why my dozen or more intimate friends who are teachers or other professionals in the educational establishment never included it on their list of problems, and why in 35 years of reading the ultra-leftist L.A. Times every day I never saw one article about what they would have trumpeted as a CRISIS IN EDUCATION, GOVERNMENT IS NOT POWERFUL ENOUGH AND SHOULD RAISE TAXES!
 
It seems you were misiniformed. The usage of 'virtually impossible' I am familiar with would render it as 'practically impossible'.
In case you have also been misinformed on the usage of 'practically impossible' it is best equated to 'really, really, unlikely, so you wouldn't want to waste betting even a dime on the odds that it actaully happened, but then again sometimes really weird things do'.
 
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