“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”

-- Socrates, circa 450 BC

I'm slowly typing up (its to fain for reliable OCR ) my some of my grandfather's reminiscences, written in a broad Bicester dialect (some of the characters in lark Rise to Candleford are thinly disguised relatives). Apparently he tried to get it published in the 40s or 50s, but they didn't like it being in non-standard English. At least that was the excuse, it's mostly about rural toilets...

Neil

Wh nds vwls. Myb th bst plc t pt ths thrd s dwn a tltt. Crsly mst ppl wll dd th mssng vwls tmtclly bt nt f t strts wth n.

John

-

From across the pond, it is very obvious that Someone could be cussed at royally in Your Country and never have a clue, then there are the names of the food. Listening to DoubleBoost is an education that helps sort things out.

Edited By mark costello 1 on 20/12/2015 14:24:40

Meaningful title.

Stay on topic.

Avoid hobby-horses, politics, racism, sexism, religion, stereotypes, bad-language, propaganda, provocations and jargon.

Think about your message. Make sure what you typed makes sense and actually says what you meant it to say.

Try to be polite and in good humour..

Check your facts.

Use the spell-checker.

Treat everyone with respect and don't demean people even if you are a world-class smarty pants.,

Tolerate mistakes, misunderstandings, ignorance and the other guy's circumstances and objectives.

Apologise when you get it wrong.

Provide evidence and references if you can.

Say thank you and recognise good work.

Don't be put off by criticism. Nobody is perfect.

You're all wonderful!

Cheers,

Dave

Thanks Dave,

Especially for the last bit

I'd add 'if it was easy, would it be worth the effort?'

Neil

Many years ago, in a former life, I worked for a company that had some very active forums (fora?). Every now and again a post would appear with some grammatical, punctuation or spelling errors, sometimes severe enough to obscure the meaning.Such posts were subsequently attacked.

Somebody decided to create a forum called "Nit Pickers", where people were invited to post anything they liked and watch to see it torn apart as a result of various errors. The objective was to post something that nobody could criticise. Creating such posts was amazingly difficult.

Anyone interested?

Nit pickers - Not me 2 reasons.

Only so much time is available for posting a reply,

Some people who have posted in this thread would receive rather strong criticism if they ever went on an effective communications course as showing just how good they can be at joining up words, even sentences plus the effective use of punctuation is counter productive in that area.

I'd get 1/10 for that last paragraph at the most,

John

-

Just read the post before hitting the "add posting " button especially on an IPad that thinks it can spell but can't.

Spell checker on here is hardly........

Talking of spelling can't someone correct the ru**y title?

Please.

edit: I mean the line under the title before the title police have a go at me.

Edited By Bazyle on 04/01/2016 22:51:24

Edited By DMB on 04/01/2016 23:32:33

I have been thinking of making an arbour or some time. I think it should have some nuts but don't know whether they should be walnuts or chestnuts.

Regards.

David.

.

Bazyle,

Don't you think that would rather spoil it

One of the few joys in this thread is that little reminder that none of us is perfect.

MichaelG.

Indeed, the original poster hoist by his own petard makes the point of this thread perfectly.

Neil

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a quay and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
It's rare lea ever wrong

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
It's letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

(Attributed to Martha Snow)

I thought Neil had unilaterally decided to change the spelling of arbor to arbour in the latest MEW.

Surely you mean are perfect Michael.

At work, once, I spent some time mastering authoring in MS Word with zero grammatical errors. Then one day thought screw this thinking I am not Gates or dare I say it an American although that aspect doesn't exactly relate.

One of the strange facts about MS zero errors is that my memo's didn't have as much effect as my normal ones. Those invariably caused people to feel like they should get up and actually do something rather than spend hours talking about it.

I wonder if the same thing applies to posts in forums. Probably not.

John

-

.

NO, John, I do not.

The word "none" is a concatenation of "no one" [or perhaps "not one"] and is therefore singular.

MichaelG.

Really Michael. Either is fine after a fashion. I tried to paste Cambridge's view on the subject but the forum reckoned that the post was too long. Due to the formatting I assume. In real terms either form is ok in English but have different implications. They also imply US use may be different. In this case I have my doubts about that.

I read read rather a lot and often wonder why I feel vaguely uncomfortable reading books written by American authors.

To be honest when I read threads like this I often feel that one way or the other pots are calling kettles black. The main aspect of a post is that it is understandable - if some one chooses to read it. Choosing to act on it is an entirely different matter. There also seems to be a tendency for some people to make assumptions about people's intelligence based on the particular style of vernacular that they choose to use. That is plainly stupid.

John

-