I'm with you, Angelaid. And if the post is one huge paragraph, or written in all caps, I give up before I start.

Spelling, grammar and usage are important to me. I don't like having to decipher what is posted. Especially when I know the writer has a good education and should know better.

I couldn't agree more. I need punctuation, capital letters, appropriate use of grammar and spelling, and spacing in a long paragraph.

If it's just verbal diarrhea, I move on.

It matters to me, too. And I absolutely detest the run-on sentences in the papers. One long winding one when 2 or even 3 would make things sooooo much better. Like others, I often skip it. IMO, it's laziness.

I'll jump on the bandwagon and agree with all of you. Not only does it matter to me in posts, but with face-to-face meetings also.

I am appalled when I listen to what comes out of the mouths of the talking heads on national televsion. One would think they should know better. However, misusage and bad grammar somehow does become the accepted thing these days.

I also agree with all of you. And I will add that people who don't know how to divide text into paragraphs should just start a new paragraph every three sentences. It would make things much easier to read.

I agree. When I am posting I do pay attention, or try anyway, to grammar and spelling (you just have to forgive my Canadian spelling). I don't pay attention to topic sentences, concluding sentences, etc but I don't think that matters in this context. I do try to not write a sentence with a dangling participle or a split infinitive (to boldly go...) but am not always successful.

Spelling, with the advent of 140 character texting, is only going to get worse.

There was a poster, I can't remember where, who used a lot of short forms for words, for eg 4 for for, u for you, etc, and it was so confusing to read I never bothered.

I also like the posts broken up into smaller paragraghs but my attention span isn't what it used to be and I thought that was the problem but maybe not.

I will jump on this bandwagon, too. Typos don't bother me very much, but if someone consistently uses the same spelling - it's no longer a typo.

I also love a paragraph. If you were speaking aloud, and needed to breathe, make a new paragraph. I simply won't read long blocks of text with rambling thoughts and no paragraph breaks. If you bring up a new topic, make a new paragraph.

Apostrophe misuse is also annoying. There are plurals and possesives - and they aren't the same.

I try to ignore the mistakes, but on a subconscious level they may be affecting my opinion of the source.

Very important. I'm not perfect, I still don't get when to use who/whom but I try to spell everything correctly and use correct grammar.

I was just reading an article on a medical blog and the person who wrote it supposedly had a master's degree. The grammar was atrocious. I'm hoping it was poor editing.

When someone writes linoleum (sp?) I always tell my monitor
to "look it up". I sometimes recognize that someone may
not have much education so I try to decipher their post
without being judgemental. What they have to say is more
important than how they say it.
It's sad when so-called educated people can't spell or construct a sentence.
BTW, I was ecstatic when GW added an "edit" button.

It would be nice to be able to have correct grammar and spelling at all times, but those things just don't register as much for me. I can go back and pick out my mistakes and those of others, but I don't see them when I'm writing even if I go back and look right away. I need a little time and distance before I can see them.

I tend to look more at content and general behavior of the poster. I learned a long time ago that some of the smartest people I've known weren't particularly articulate and an education doesn't necessarily translate to an intelligent person either. Some people have the gift of gab and spelling, others have talent in other areas.

I "notice" stuff like that, and most of the time I can figure out what the poster is trying to say.....especially these last few years when my spelling has really taken some hits; it has made me more forgiving. Wish my spell-check worked on this computer... so sometimes I just give up and not post. Really....what is more important?

Well, with Spell Check, there should not be any spelling errors. I purposefully spelled it here the way I did just to see what came up. Three choices were offered, so that should eliminate the (?) when someone wonders about their spelling, but I still see it quite often. I can overlook grammar errors, because not everyone has been exposed to a proper education, and also local usage often colors our language.

On a forum like this, including texting or abbreviations such as those mentioned are irritating to me and give the impression of "Hey, look at me; I'm really cool!"

Lack of punctuation makes it hard to keep my mind on the subject.

What really, really irritates me is the way some words are purposefully misspelled, or respelled in order to express a profanity. Carp is an example and is seen often. WTF, WTH, OMG, are still, to me, profanity.

Many complain about the poor wording in business messages. Should we complain when ours are no better?

Sue

I have to agree, but when I type on the iPad I find I make mistakes in spelling and punctuation.

After having survived a childhood with undiagnosed dyslexia, my mastery over it opened the doors of reading and writing for me. A very dark, cold feeling comes over me at the fear of someone judging me for my occasional slips...even though I enjoyed a long career of writing and public speaking.

So, I will never, ever judge anyone unkindly on these forums for poor grammar or spelling. The forums are comprised of people from all over the world, from all kinds of socioeconomic levels, and with a broad range of education. As long as I live on this earth, I will never judge.

As the daughter and sister of an English teacher, and being one myself, I do cringe when I see an error I have made as I read an old post of mine. I find many of my errors are from my lousy typing skills. Nevertheless, I do notice when I see anyone's posts with lots of errors.

I got into trouble with my principal in Illinois for teaching adverbs in an English composition class. (The year was divided into a literature
semester and a composition semester.) He was not the brightest soul.

I remember my poor mother trying to eliminate "ain't" from the vocabulary of her four children in central Illinois. She would be happy to know that it may have happened slowly, but she accomplished her goal.

I make a lot of errors because my phone is ridiculously difficult to type with. Ignore if you will my brilliant but incorrectly dictioned pontifications.

Verbal diarrhea, I love that description!! Boy, this topic really hits home for me. I hate seeing posts that run on and on, with no punctuation. It's not my job to decipher what that person is trying to say.

I don't like misspellings, but that doesn't bother me that much. If I can't spell a word easily, I will try to use another word. If the word I want to use means that much, I will look it up and then use it.

My home page is our local television station's website and just today, two people commented on the poor grammar use for a story that was posted there. The one poster asked if it wasn't too much to ask that the station require a person working there have at least a grade school education. That made me laugh out loud!!

It looks so unprofessional to see things like that. I cringe every time I see a "crawl" message with misspellings in it. Surely they have someone editing what goes on the screen, or they should have.

What a great topic!! Thanks for posting it!!

It is important to me when I'm writing the post, but not so much when reading others' posts. Using the ipad can create errors if one doesn't proofread, then that can be a bit embarrassing.

It is very important to me. English is my second language, and I try my best.

A few days ago I read my old journal post on crazyguy, and found several mistakes. Of course, I had to go and edit/correct it.

Sometimes I wonder about the written language.

Moni

So, I will never, ever judge anyone unkindly on these forums for poor grammar or spelling.

Rhizo, I don't think any of us are being unkind--at least not in this thread! :-)

The OP said:

If the grammar, spelling, etc., end up confusing the reader or obscuring the meaning, the point of the subject matter gets lost, as does my attention span.

And that's what most of us agreed with. We don't judge the writer; we simply find poor communication difficult to decipher. And with so many things requesting our attention on the Internet, some of us (including myself) move on. But it's not done in a mean-spirited way.

I just cringe when I go back and read an old post of mine and find some transgression of grammar or spelling. It happens more often than I'd like, too.

As far as the offerings of others, I do notice things but unless they are just outrageous and continuous, I can cope. Some things get under my skin, though, like failure to distinguish among their, there, and they're. And typing in "text": u for you, etc. I find that very irritating and tend not to take the post seriously.

Rhizo , I agree with you. I do notice poor grammar, spelling etc but honestly the content of the post is what I focus on. Satine

It depends, really. Some people don't like my style of writing - which falls under the class of "colloquial". Over use of commas, brakets, dashes, intentional mispellings of certain words to convey feeling or expression.

I don't care much for grammar, and I am sure I have misplaced a preposition or two. And I never know where to put that dratted appostrophe! But my father was an English teacher so I am sure my posts can't be TOO bad.

Dances.

I can forgive some but if it seems "put on" I pass...and I have fallen for some woe is me story complete with all sorts of errors...think it was here some poor woman getting out of a bad marriage? it went on for several weeks...

I hate it when words are left out and you have to figure out what they were trying to say!! Happens alot on Facebook posts!

I think if you are going to spend your time judging people who are having a little bit of fun on a forum and most of the time not interested in whether something is spelled right, punctuated, or even grammatically correct and maybe in a hurry, taking a break between chores. or before the baby wakes up then perhaps, just perhaps...you need to find a higher form/level of entertainment...is this verbal diarrhea what you are talking about...it was fun to do...

This post was edited by ruthieg__tx on Tue, Jul 16, 13 at 14:12

I have to say it again: We are not judging anybody. This is simply a matter of choosing what we will read. With so many demands on our attention, some of us are unwilling to put forth the effort required to decipher some posts.

And I'm not exaggerating about the effort. The older I get, the easier it is for my attention to wander. And the harder it is to stick with an interminable paragraph.

This does not make me a critical reader of message boards. I am, however, a critical reader of books and other media. I've worked as an editor and writer, and bad writing/editing jumps out at me in publications. Email, Facebook, and message boards are different. I don't edit my own messages, and I expect others to be dashing off theirs as well.

Sounds pretty much to me like judging..

Then as I said...perhaps as I said, you need to find a bit of higher class entertainment instead of trying to make people here on the board who might not have your level of education feel bad. You don't have to have any qualifications to post here and as has said many time, every one can "SOB" but why is it necessary to point out anyone's inadequacy's...after all most people are here just for fun...not to get an education or to prove to anyone how educated.. I've really said what I have to say but I wanted to edit just to say that I am really surprised by your attitude...for some reason I would have expected better of you...

And honestly alisande...everyone enjoys your posts, your pictures, your family but I would be willing to bet that no one really cares that you have worked as an editor or writer and we certainly don't care whether bad writing jumps out at you...If it bothers you so much, I think you need to find another place to play and I don't think that you have the right to expect anything of the other members here...We enjoy you and would hope that you at least make an effort to at least enjoy us,,,if not..remember...SOB...but why try and offend any of us..

This post was edited by ruthieg__tx on Tue, Jul 16, 13 at 15:24

Wow--maybe my communication skills are lacking. Here I tried (twice) to explain that I'm not trying to offend any of you, that I'm not critical of KT posts, FB posts, email, and other notes we all dash off, but it appears I managed to convey just the opposite to you, Ruthie. That's unfortunate, but it seems useless for me to try again.

I guess whoever said "there is no reality, only perception" wasn't far off.

It bothers me a lot when your is written instead of you're.

Ruthie - I don't feel judged at all. I make a lot of errors. I know it's the only "face" I have here - so of course an entry with a lot of errors will be seen differently.

No biggee IMO.

I have a hard time enjoying posts that use no capital letters or paragraph breaks, or if every sentence is a paragraph. It really doesn't take any extra time on a computer to make a letter bigger or hit enter to give the eye a break and help you read more easily. :)

And if something makes no sense at all, like it was written by someone on drugs, I click out of it almost immediately. Maybe it's auto-correct, maybe it's not, but I don't take the time to decipher gibberish.

Amy, I wasn't going to add any more to this thread (somehow I got singled out here, and I'm not sure why), but I want to respond to your post. Honestly, I've never noticed errors of any kind in your posts. My impression of you is an intelligent, insightful, talented person.

I think if we go back to the original post, we'll see that the comments were about the texts, not the writers. All we were saying is that we scroll on by some posts rather than try to figure them out.

On a Lyme Disease forum I belong to, people are asked not to post in long paragraphs because those with Lyme find it difficult to track a train of thought if it isn't broken up into smaller chunks. That certainly is true of me--though I don't know if I can blame it on Lyme--and it's one of the things we were talking about.

Ohmygoodnessnojudgmentoroffensintendedatallijustlosemytrainofthoughttryingtodecipherpoatswithnocaporallcapsnopunctuationandornoparagraphbreaks.

I'm with you FlamingO -- if every sentence is a paragraph, or if there are no paragraphs at all -- I scroll on by. I can't force myself to read those. It sets my mental teeth on edge.

Must be really hot in Texas

Sleeperblues - what's up with the Texas comment?

it's hotter than usual around here too, near 100 today.

I'm critical of my own errors and it embarrasses me when I discover a grammatical or spelling error in my posts. Now that we have the edit feature I correct them if I find them.

Usually I bypass a post that's all caps or one really long paragraph. It's just too much effort to decipher it.

I didn't think anyone in this post judged people - the comments were limited to grammar errors and the difficulties in reading lengthy posts that aren't broken into paragraphs.

I've spent enough time online, I have now decided people should have two sets of rules. Online, people try to write as they would speak. I like it! Other times, it's greatly important to adhere to the rules, when you can. But there are many types of people out there, I have gone the other route; I auto-correct what they may have gotten wrong.

If I know what someone is saying, that's enough for me. I spend so much of my time proof-reading for work, I sure don't want to do it during my down time or what should be my pleasure time.

I did get a good laugh at church recently, when the posted a new song overhead and the word should've been things and instead it was thin. Huge difference!

When we meet someone in person, we have lots of visual clues about them. Think: "Clothes make the man." and "The eyes are the windows to the soul." Online, all we have to go by are the words on the screen.

I'm in favor of people writing the way they talk. It may not be 'proper', but it makes me think we're friends.

My spelling has never improved. I married a man whose high school Latin has made him my 'call to' dictionary. Mostly, I don't ask -- as you all know!

(There is a downside to living with the human dictionary. He catches every peculiar mistake in the TV crawl -- and there are more and more of those. Do we have ESL people writing these things?)

It is important to me because English is my 2nd language. By trying my best to write it correctly, my verbal language goes along well. Well, actually, it's the other way around according to my English professor. I was so confused at times when writing. One day, he told me. Listen to the way you speak English. You speak more correctly than you write. LOL! Things turned around ever since.

I do tell my English speaking friends to avoid using slangs with me when they can. I don't want them to spoil my communication. It sure has been an adventure with all the languages I had to learn in my lifetime.... so far.

ntt_hou -- Oh, no you don't! You can't leave us dangling like that. Please tell us about the languages you've needed to learn...and why!