Isn't about time MNHQ started deleting posts that attack people's spelling and grammar?

[cuntycowfacemonkey]

(In advance I will say any of my posts are likely to have spelling and grammar mistakes)

It's such a shitty thing to do and often it is directed at poster who then feel they have to explain themselves and disclose they have dyslexia. I don't understand why MN tolerate people with potential disabilities being mocked in this way?

Why can it not be regarded as a personal attack and such comments deleted. Very often the arses that post comments about another posters spelling bring nothing else to the thread and usually it derails the thread and the OP's original issue gets lost in the ensuing bunfight.

How very Buffy the Vampire Slayer of him.

Confused if your DH asks it's because he wants to know.

That's different to complete strangers pointing fingers at his mistakes when he hasn't asked them to do so.

My husband is retired now. When he was working, he would rely on his assistant or on me (numerous phone calls) for help. Then with the advent of spell check, he began to rely on that, hence the stake-steak problem. Now he just asks me to proof read his Facebook posts.

You misunderstood me, confused. I didn't mean he's lazy, or that he doesn't have things going on in his life.

I meant, you're talking as if a correction could be offered once, and people (like your DH) would suddenly know which was the right spelling to use next time. And the fact your DH needs to ask repeatedly indicates this isn't how it works, for him and for others.

I am like that. I know the difference between, say, metre and meter, but I forget, or rather, I slip up when my mind is on other things and then can't remember what that difference is. It's fairly normal.

But if someone were to tell me every time I got things wrong, they'd never stop, and I'd just end up not posting.

On FB, yes, fine, I would say.

I am disappointed by MNHQ's response, and while-heartedly agree with the OP.

It's is bullying behaviour that should not be tolerated!

I have a (very) high IQ, but am also dyslexic - I rarely post on here for fear of being judged (that I feel I have to qualify "dyslexia" with "high IQ" says it all really!). I am sure I am not alone in this.

People may have poor SPAG due to dyslexia, any other SN, or those who are just a product of poor education (under-performing school, long periods of absence from school due to ill-health, children who's education was disrupted by bullying, children in care who are frequently moved around...). It is not okay for other posters to feel the need to smugly distribute Dunce hats. I am certain that MN looses a great wealth of input from Other lurkers who avoid posting for fear of ridicule.

MNHQ, you need to rethink your stance on this.

TBH, I don't think a sticky is a terrible idea - though it'd be bloody annoying to have it at the top of things, so better if it were something more tucked away, like Talk Guidelines.

I just don't think it will solve the problem. Some people may like to check every time they post, but others won't want to, or won't be able to.

devora's right - it'd take ages and disrupt the flow of things.

And besides, who would write it? As has been observed, the regular group who like to correct tend to have pretty faulty SPAG.

Good grief, there are a lot of pompous prigs around lately, aren't there

Spuriously correcting people's SPAG on a forum is the exact equivalent of correcting their pronunciation in RL. As some of you may have discovered, people tend to walk away from you if you prefer belittling their speech to hearing what they have to say.

I'm wondering whether some of the 'prefects' on here have been socially abandoned due to their horrible manners ...

That's a bloody shame, Mrsrochesterscat. Please post!

I keep thinking I'd love Benjamin Zephaniah to be an MNer.

The effect of seeing misspellings has been researched. It was found that being exposed to the wrong spelling of a word increased the likelihood of that word being misspelled in the future, even if, before exposure, the person was confident about the correct spelling.

I must admit, that before I came on MN, I never misused their, there or they're, but after I'd been on MN for a while, I found I was having to concentrate on using the right one.

Having said that, despite being a bit of a pedant myself and knowing the effect of repeatedly reading wrong SPAG, I think it is rude to completely miss the point or distress expressed in a post and pick on SPAG for your own aggrandisement or amusement.

Unlss it's a goady fucker, of course, in which case fill yer boots

are we going to tell posters who have English as a second language to stay away till they're fluent?

I've co-authored with Chinese and Japanese speakers. Their English may have been stilted, and their grasp of idiom at times somewhat eccentric, but their basic spelling and grammar was at least as good as people with equivalent qualifications who are native English speakers.

There is a very obvious "EFL" register, and as well as noticing it isn't their first language you can often spot the writer's home language in their English, but overall I'd say the standard English as written by educated adults for whom it's a foreign language is pretty well flawless. There's a literature on why EFL speakers and writers can be spotted as such, but the claim that remarking on "would of" and "I might loose some money on the deal" is discriminatory to EFL writers is bogus: EFL writers just don't make mistakes like that.

confused - it's not ok to pull people up on FB either! I said I thought for her to use those words on FB is ok.

I love the eccentricities of EFL writers, it enriches the language imo.

Good grief, there are a lot of pompous prigs around lately, aren't there

At the risk of sounding pompous, can I just point out your spelling mistake?

You meant pompous pricks didn't you?

Actually, going back to Rebecca's post for a minute.

I'm surprised she said that HQ believe picking up on someone's spelling is fine.

The last time this issue was raised, someone from HQ (can't remember who now) told us to report people who were picking others up, if I remember rightly.

On FB, yes, fine, I would say.

But in practice, people don't make errors in basic language while writing informally and then suddenly get it right when writing more formally. Over on Relationships (AIBU? _Chat? Somewhere) there's been an long-running saga of someone falling out with their father in law in part because he writes letters, in the depths of what is obviously a labyrinth of family turmoil, in precisely correct inter-office memo-ese circa 1973.

This whole thread is a variation of the same thing: people who have at some point in their life written a ten thousand word essay and see all written communication in the same light, versus people who basically write what they would say in speech. It took until the 1970s for linguists to finally admit that written and spoken English are fundamentally different rather than the latter aspiring to be the former, and if you transcribe the spoken English even of someone who writes very precisely it will often not form sentences (that's why linguists talk about "utterances"). But today we write a lot more than we did in the 1970s, so those who want to write precisely can, and those that want to write a transcript of what they would say, can (and there's fun to be had with that last comma, isn't there?)

So someone who's writing "your" for "you're" or vice versa is unlikely to know how to get it right in any register (see also its versus it's). People who do know the difference will get it right in any circumstance. But they could quite profitably all cut each other some slack.