Why's it so bad to correct people's spelling mistakes?

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Exactly.

If I see a post which is just a massive wall of text with no paragraphing and next to no punctuation, I just will not read it.

Besides, CR, I don't think your grammar is bad at all. You overuse commas but other than that you're fine.

How many people know the "correct" usage of the words "shall" and "should"?
"I should like to go for a walk with you". "I shall be with you in a moment".

Early versions of the Bible use "thee" and "thou". These have completely disappeared from the English language.

I agree with many American spellings like "center" instead of "centre"

And yet they come up with ridiculous words like "burglarized".

"Horrible"? As in ugly?

Consider the spelling of the word 'through'. Some people find beauty in fluidity, in efficiency. 'Through' is filled with wasted motion. Is its 'u' necessary? 'gh'? I can imagine that someone might find 'gh' ugly in most contexts if they find efficiency appealing. Where is the necessity of the 'gh' in 'fight' or in 'light'?

Some people think that "thru" would be a more beautiful word to use. Maybe you don't. I don't. But some people do, and this suggests that misspellings are not necessarily uglier than the way we are supposed to spell words.

But I suspect that, at least for me, what it is that is horrible about misspellings is that they are wrong. But if this is the case, it is entirely arbitrary, because if we lived in a society where we 'writ lik dis', then if someone were to 'write like this' I would think it ugly, because it is wrong. This too suggests that there is no inherent beauty in the way we are spelling words now.

As for "reducing the art of writing to nothing"? I'm not even sure what you mean by this.

Look at hw im writin nw r u tellin me dis looks nce? i dnt thnk so.

As for reducing the art of writing to nothing... Writing is an art form, and it'll be ruined if we all wrote like I did in that last paragraph. It's a hard thing to describe. It's more emotional than logical.

English is not a phonetic language. As a non-native speaker, I see it as a matter of respect to try to write and speak as correctly as I can - I see it as a hygiene issue, something I do for myself. Even if occasionally I have problems understanding posts with very bad grammar, I don't complain as I know it's seen as a put down.

And although I agree with "Because it's horrible and it reduces the art of writing to nothing" Asp-Z, you must take into account that this is just a internet forum, not a book

My argument was not that spelling mistakes look nice. In fact, I am at a loss as to how you came away with that idea. I shall try to restate it, and hope that I make it clearer.

My suggestion was that incorrect spelling is not necessarily uglier than correct spelling. My presenting to you an example of a word that I have heard called ugly, 'through', was intended to suggest that the idea that correct spelling is in some way necessarily more beautiful than incorrect is not the case.

The argument given by those who want to replace 'through' with 'thru' is that it is a more streamlined spelling. Language is a tool, I think they would say. Tools are ugly when they are awkward or unwieldy, and beautiful when they are efficient. Hence they would say that "we go thru the door" is more beautiful than "we go through the door". As I said earlier, I doubt you agree with them, but that is irrelevant because the example shows that the idea that "it's horrible" is not one that anyone has to accept.



I competely agree with you here, I think, although I also agree with Sallamandrina. But, I suspect the "it's more emotional that logical" can also be claimed by people who say that they don't like it when people correct their spelling.

I think I get what you're saying, though personally I think "through" is nicer than "thru". "Thru" just reminds me of McDonalds.



Good point.

I don't understand why people are getting offended...
The people who are good with spelling and grammar are trying to help those who are not by telling them the correct way to spell the word.
They're helping, not meaning to be insulting (when I do so I have no malicious intent; I cannot speak for everyone... but just by reading the posts in this thread I do believe that many of us who find nothing wrong with correcting spelling mistakes correct them to be helpful).

And though I don't have any sort of learning disability related to things like math and languages, I do have problems with socializing due to the fact that I have AS. I don't get offended when someone tells me that what I said was inappropriate to say at that time, or that I should have greeted that person differently, etc. I take it as the person caring about me and wanting to help me so I don't make the same mistake or a similar mistake in the future.

I haven't read all the posts on this thread yet, but I want to clarify my first post. I do recognize that threads on a forum are less formal than something published professionally. I also understand that what a person says is the only important thing. How he says it is not, but it can interfere with communication. I also recognize that those with learning disabilities are going to communicate differently. I still welcome their posts and I wouldn't think of not reading the rest of a post if I encounter a spelling error, for example. I also do not assume that what they are saying is less likely to be worthwhile.

Do you realise what you just asked?





Pedantry fail.

I imagine that if one had learning difficulties with regards to reading and writing, then constantly having to look up words just in case someone took offense to a letter or two out of place would get in the way of being able to communicate effectively (trying keeping your train of thought while having to interrupt yourself constantly to look up most of the words in a sentence), and eventually it would stop being worth the effort.

Is it dyslexia?

What is more important, the ideas expressed in writing or how the words are spelled?

And seriously, "Looks nice"?

Looking nice is an appropriate criteria for judging paintings and women's clothing.



Language changes. It's unspeakably awful, yes, but language is determined by usage, not by dictionaries and style guides.

Well it is hard to read and I had to block your posts because I couldn't stand seeing them. I thought you had a learning disability but your posts still annoyed me and then I found you were using a phone to post here. But I never said anything about it because I figured you were learning disabled. But you're not blocked anymore because your spelling is good now.


Text talk is one of the things that bothers me online so I skip their posts. Sometimes I will try and read it but it depends.

I think, at the end of the day, we should just impose this sort of policy:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ0l_vPyUmg[/youtube]

Yes. We should.