Style in Writing

Post Reply New Topic

What is it about WrongPlanet that draws people posting a wall of text? It's a crime that people aren't taught paragraphing, or even sentence-ending punctuation.

Guess style is a special interest of mine.

I have the opposite problem LOL.

I have a tendency towards being overly laconic.

You can be laconic with me any time, KK!

Wall-o-text is an Aspie trait, sooo that’s probably what does it.

I’ve noticed that when my symptoms are stronger I tend to do this more here, and when they’re well under control I’m more concise.

People are rebellious. Just because you’ve been taught something doesn’t mean you have to apply it, or even remember it any longer than you strictly need to so you won’t fail at school.

Well, I was a tech writer *and* a department head, and I was very reluctant to even interview anyone whose online presence showed either laziness, functional illiteracy, or both. Rebels without a job? If it makes you happy, go for it...

My bugbear is functional illiteracy. Although I've begun to realize, because people are grouching about it elsewhere online, that some tech devices will now go above and beyond and *make mistakes for you*, free for nothing, using autocorrect (should be called "automatic typo addition" or ATA for short).

(So yay, Sidney Harris was right, there IS artificial stupidity!)

Also, using a lot of leetspeak (LOL U R pwn3d KWIM? BRB) makes my teeth grow hair. After shaving them several times, I usually avoid the sites where this occurs. (Otherwise, baleen whales start sending me raunchy texts. This I do not need.)

Over and out

What do you even mean by functional illiteracy? At this point, I can’t bring myself to use that expression without thinking I’m a smug hypocrite looking for an easy excuse to feel superior to people much more successful than me in life. If they understand one another writing the way they do, then, by definition, their writing is perfectly functional, whether it suits your taste or not. To most people, the rules of spelling and punctuation serve no purpose but as a sort of institutionalized hazing. The previous generation used it to torture them as kids and teenagers, so they do the same to the next generation. Very few people take seriously the practical advantages of consistently following the rules; in fact, they seldom experience them, since they don’t expect the writer to adhere to the rules in the first place. Among the people who do care, we socially awkward types are massively overrepresented, because we’re naturally blind to social phenomena.

And this brings us to your other point: laziness. Well, in my experience, most people will never miss a chance to save some effort at your expense. The need for slightly elaborate rules arises when you want to be precise or convey much information efficiently. Their solution, therefore, is to keep it simple and vague, and to let you spend your energy trying to clear up the confusion, only to get in trouble sooner or later when you exhaust the patience of everyone present.

Let’s face it: conscientious writing is for nerds. We’re living the revenge of normal people.

Functional illiteracy is a well established term. I came of age in the late 1970s, and there was far more emphasis on literacy, on a global scale, then than there is now.

Here's a Wikipedia article, with references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy

One common manifestation of this is when a writer fails to differentiate between your and you're, or thinks that yours is spelled your's. They are literate in that they can read, but not literate enough to write competently, or spell correctly, or remember basic rules of grammar. The laziness comes in when they know this, and can't be bothered to correct it. (exception obviously for non-native speakers and writers. They're trying, and that's positive no matter how far along they are, gramatically and orthographically.)

'at ain't th' same as speakin' or writin' dialect. That's intentional; this is not. That can be put aside when the person must speak and write formally; this cannot be (or will not be, if the underlying issue is that grammar and spelling "aren't the boss of them" and they intend to prove it).

Yeah, I call it the Revenge of the C Students myself. I do think that the Internet rule that one never corrects even the most egregious errors in writing has done vast harm - it's done a great deal to make concern for quality writing a *negative* thing.

Not sure how I struck a nerve here, but I pretty clearly did. That's unfortunate; didn't mean to; think the best course of action is for me to leave you strictly alone henceforth. No rancor; just tired of this sort of thing. Sometimes people just - rub each other the wrong way - best thing to do there is to realize it and go on with your lives.

Peace to you. Over and out.

In that case, I guess that makes me a nerd. Can't say I'm surprised, during my time at school I was known as a walking dictionary and thesaurus. People would come to me if they wanted a good word for an insult. These days I get called a human encyclopedia (mainly on animals, specifically cats).

Also, at school, once I was dragged by a group of girls into the playground after they remarked "Hey you're a nerd, I know this other nerd that needs friends" and then I met this girl and we had an awkward conversation and sure enough we did become friends.



Well, I have wondered the same thing before. There are some peculiar writing styles here that I seldom see elsewhere. At first I thought that perhaps it was just people getting swept up in an interest, but some users post in a certain fashion regardless of the subject matter. Paragraphs are useful because they help organise information, otherwise it can be a bit daunting trying to take all of the writing in at once. Sometimes a lot is written, but very little information is being conveyed. I have seen cases where people have written a whole paragraph where a simple sentence would've sufficed in that circumstance with the same amount of information conveyed.

Idiosyncratic language can sometimes confuse me, however if I am able to make sense of and identify certain text patterns, then usually I can figure out what the user is trying to communicate. Although, this isn't always the case as there have been times where I have stumbled upon a post beyond my understanding, and I can't ask what they mean because I wouldn't know how to approach it since I didn't understand any of it at all. This is unfortunate when it's a long post where they have clearly put a lot of thought into it, but there doesn't seem to be any sort of focus or clarity. It just comes across as incomprehensible. Sometimes I understand such posts for the first few paragraphs, but then I become completely lost.

Personally, I doubt many individuals here expect posts to reach a writing level fit for an professional academic essay. However, by following simple rules you can cut down on a great deal of confusion.



The problem with the education system is that it often fails to accurately teach why something is important besides the fact that you have to learn it to pass the class. Punctuation is imperative because it sets the tone of what is being said, for example exclamation marks show that yelling is involved. They are also often used as a sign to signify that something is important or dangerous as well, particularly in warnings. Mistakes will indeed be made, even as someone who writes stories in her spare time and is used to rigorously editing, sometimes I miss simple errors/typos.

Last edited by Lost_dragon on 12 Aug 2018, 8:40 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Maybe it's because of the Aspie tendency to infodump, plus social difficulties making it so that we don't know how others will read our posts. (Though it's not just Aspies that do this.) Plus, some people might have learning disabilities that cause problems with grammar and punctuation.

You coulda said all of this in just three words: "folks are stupid".

I know it’s a well-established term. My point stands.



I’m pretty sure the Internet only made more visible the way most people already thought about this topic, destroying the illusion that everyone who ever wrote anything was a nerd like us.



No, you didn’t. If anything, the slow realization of how this issue works did, quite a few years ago. It made me think a lot; I had to reëvaluate my previous assumptions and I still don’t exactly know what to do. I tried to debate, something most people seem to avoid like the plague, probably for the same aforementioned social reasons, but since I tend to be blind to them, what I see is that it’s the way to learn, as opposed to quickly making up your mind and rejecting any contradicting evidence.



I’d prefer that you made fewer assumptions about me, but whatever. Goodbye.

Maybe, but I think most people simply don’t care. To them, the why is itself yet another tedious piece of information to memorize while you have to, so you can parrot it, and then forget. Remember: we like learning; they like being rebellious.



Their solution: if it needs punctuation to be understood, it’s too complex

Some doesn't look into style actually but in my case, that impressed me most here. Unique words that some uses caught my attention most of the time.

I've become grudgingly accepting of the one-word substitution of there, they're, their and similar.

It's just that wall-o-text that turns me off. I'll tell you something: I won't even read that person's post. This is definitely laziness on my part. But those few times I force myself to read it, I almost never comment because the overall effect of the post is a confused rant, and what can you say to a rant?

Something I've always wondered: are people who habitually write using walls of text also especially good at reading them?

I suspect that, in general, this is not the case. So, regardless of any other measure of good English, it gives the impression that the writer assumes that it is acceptable to burden the reader with the extra effort of deciphering the post (especially when the standard of English is otherwise good, or there is a "sorry about the wall of text" closing the post!) I also think that not proof-reading/editing can rob the writer of the opportunity to clarify their own thoughts; I have often had revelations about my own opinions and arguments when attempting to clarify a post which came out ambiguous and badly structured at the first attempt.