The decreasing standards of written English

adolf hamster said:
this is an internet forum not an english exam i (and i assume i'm not alone in this) simply cannot be bothered fixing most of them.
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I don't understand that line of reasoning at all. A badly-constructed sentence looks lazy and unintelligent, regardless of what the poster 'meant' to say.
 
Lysander said:
I don't understand that line of reasoning at all. A badly-constructed sentence looks lazy and unintelligent, regardless of what the poster 'meant' to say.
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that would imply that i place value in impressing strangers on the internet.

if someone would rather take judgement based on the presentation rather than the content then that's a them problem.
 
BallistixOnZ490 said:
This reminds me how at uni, I was once 'corrected' by multiple other students for saying 'repetitive' when they thought it was meant to be 'repetive'.

I was in fact correct.
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That is annoying, but at the same time it feels good to be proved right and the accusers proved wrong :cry:.
 
adolf hamster said:
i know i'm terrible for doing that, i just over-use comma's constantly and take a new line.

seems a better alternative than a wall of text, that's just hard to read.
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Yeah if you put a comma in at least i can still read it sort of but with no full stops or comma's you end up reading it mono toned and out of breath lol. I do get some people have issues or learning difficulties too so you can't really blame them.
 
Ultimately there are more people who are bad at writing than good at writing, so it follows that over time the acceptable standard would drop.
 
BallistixOnZ490 said:
Except they wouldn't accept any proof that I was right and they were wrong.

And there were at least 50 such cases of this that happened prior to me turning into a nihilist.
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Wow, they were stubborn ones. You'd expect that university students would understand the value of learning from one's mistakes.
 
I've noticed it a lot on these forums. A predominantly English/British forum yet people are unable to differentiate between: "you're" and "your" also: they're, there and their. "could have" when it should be "could have" I understand "could have" is possibly an easy one to get wrong as it sounds like that when you say it, well it sounds like "could've" which is the correct way to spell it.

Still, writing English correctly isn't a difficult task, although I do make mistakes so I'm not perfect.

Lysander said:
I don't understand that line of reasoning at all. A badly-constructed sentence looks lazy and unintelligent, regardless of what the poster 'meant' to say.
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Exactly, it doesn't take any more effort to write coherently.
 
BallistixOnZ490 said:
Once or twice, barring typo errors that were immediately corrected.

Based on the frequency of how much I post here, and how most of my posts are entirely correct, I'm not proof reading them that much.

Often I spot typos when others quote my post, then go back and correct them out of courtesy.

I admit its definitely an OCD.

Id make a great proof reader, but I lack the usual 2 years experience that every single job needs.
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Quoted...
 
TurtleTwo said:
I've noticed it a lot on these forums. A predominantly English/British forum yet people are unable to differentiate between: "you're" and "your" also: they're, there and their. "could have" when it should be "could have" I understand "could have" is possibly an easy one to get wrong as it sounds like that when you say it, well it sounds like "could've" which is the correct way to spell it.

Still, writing English correctly isn't a difficult task, although I do make mistakes so I'm not perfect.

It makes me wonder who taught them English in the first place.



Exactly, it doesn't take any more effort to write coherently.
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I think social media ingrains mistakes, when you read something over and over again your brain automatically learns that it's correct without you realising. I think everyone falls into this trap sometimes and particularly with Americanisms. I've seen plenty of prominent and educated people using 'lead' instead of 'led' in the past tense and there are quite a lot of people on forums who write 'could care less' when they mean 'couldn't care less'.
 
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TurtleTwo said:
Exactly, it doesn't take any more effort to write coherently.
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I've seen adolf's argument used here before: "it's not an English exam".

Basically some people don't see why they should write properly and there's nothing you can do to convince them. It's not worth arguing about.
 
Lysander said:
Basically some people don't see why they should write properly
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it's a case of standards.

the lack of capital letters at the start of sentences, the misuse of commas instead of full stops, or the occasional typographical error does not make a sentence incomprehensible.

there's quite the gap between skipping the more formal points of grammar in an informal context and typin lyk u bin charge by da letta
 
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