The older I become the more I notice stuff. I notice how badly some young girls dress, I notice how inappropriate some stuff is on TV and I notice bad grammar, spelling, punctuation and the chronic misuse of words.
Now don’t get me wrong, I know with the advent of computers, spell check and the relentless desire for immediate news and information to be published in the moment will cause things to be overlooked. Things to be written incorrectly with no time to proof read. Things that are just published as fast as possible in real time, without any concern for the actual accuracy of language use or basic spelling. I understand all that and I accept it.
I accept it when you are chatting in a chat room or a messenger, obviously you want to type your message using the least amount of keystrokes as possible so you type things like “i will c u l8r lol” and I do this in all chats, on text messages and when commenting or writing statements on social networking sites. I do not have a problem with abbreviated typing, acronyms, shortening of words, leaving out commas, apostrophes and always using lower case. This is normal for this type of situation. I’ve been on chat groups since 1995 and at first I was horrified at the terrible spelling when I realised, that is what you do. It’s the way it should be… again in those forums/situations it’s perfectly acceptable.
Then there’s normal posting on websites and forums, commenting, status updates, tweets, blogs things like that. In these cases of course there is room for error. It is no big deal if there are some mistakes or misspellings although why people don’t just run a spell check when writing a large piece of text like a blog is beyond me. Spell check doesn’t fix everything but it can correct the most obvious mistakes. But you still need to proof read. More on that later. So in my case, when I post on social networking sites or Twitter for instance, sometimes I abbreviate words or leave out commas, but I try to keep my spelling and word use accurate. After all you want your message to be understood and not confusing. So in this situation it’s acceptable to be a little slack and bend the rules a bit, I don’t have a problem with that at all.
What I can understand is when someone will shorten a word like phone to fone. Or tomorrow to 2moro. That doesn’t bother me. What I can’t accept is when people use the wrong words or actually can’t spell words that should have been learned in primary school. Sure, not all of us listened in school, or even went to school that much but people, please. Give me a break. You have to know the difference between There, Their and They’re. This is common sense. So is the use of Your and You’re. Come on … everybody has to know the correct spelling and use of these words!!!
I cannot tell you how much it irks me to constantly go online and see words like these and many more such as Where, we’re and were… and my pet hate the misuse of It’s and Its. So annoying. I’m not here to give you a grammar lesson. There are many sites on the internet that will help you with that, but seriously, I think everyone needs to wake up and realise that it’s not a good look!
Again as I stated before, none of this stuff matters when you are texting or chatting etc. But I tell you, it does matter on websites such as news.com.au and other official news sites, information sites, educational sites, and official government sites.
I am sorry but I do not accept that a site like news.com.au can possibly find it acceptable to publish stories with incorrectly spelt headlines, and content with bad grammar, wrong word use, and obvious spelling mistakes. This is totally unacceptable. These are sites that are used for research, information and education. They are not setting a good example. What does it say about their company when they cannot spare two minutes to proof read an article before it’s published? Is it really that urgent that proof reading is just not an option anymore? I find that hard to believe. I worked as a proof reader for a newspaper company in the 80’s. My job was to read what the editor had already approved and check for any obvious spelling or grammatical errors. After all, the writer’s job was to write the article, not worry about all that little stuff, that was my job. If a newspaper article was published with mistakes in the body, let alone the headline, somebody would be out of a job, seriously fast.
Of course I am not forgetting that those were the days of manual typewriters, and no computers. We started to get computers in the late 80’s and electronic typewriters and word processors were starting to be used more often. But originally, if you typed something wrong, you had to type the whole page or article again, manually. And newspapers were printed from plates of type face, not from a computer and a printer! So what I am getting at is that because we had to be careful in those days, because it was such a hard job to have to re-do things over and over again, it seems that naturally more care was taken. More proof reading was done, more checking and consequently you would barely, if ever, see a spelling mistake or error of any kind in the final publication.
Now of course with computers and the immediate need for news, we find stuff being published with mistakes all over the place, all the care and caution is gone. And I’m not just talking about the online newspapers, but the print newspapers. The mistakes in the printed newspapers today make me cringe and make me wonder, do they need a proof reader? Hello, I’m here!
Now of course as discussed, there is a big difference between abbreviating words in chats and texting, to outright misspellings and incorrect word use. We also have the phenomenon of typos. The good old typo has caught us out many a time. If you are a touch typist like me you will know the true meaning of a typo. A typo is not a spelling mistake. A typo is when you accidentally type two letters inversed such as “hte” he instead of “the” or “lauhg” instead of laugh as the letters are close to each other on the keyboard and being a touch typist, you don’t look at the keyboard and all it takes is for your fingers to start on the wrong letters and typos are the result. This is also perfectly acceptable in chats, online forums and social networking as anyone can see that it’s not a spelling mistake or a wrong word being used. Typos are usually auto corrected in programs such as Word so they are not an issue for publications. They do tend to appear in forums and Twitter and of course chats and texting but that’s not an issue. I am guilty of typo errors and it comes with the territory!
Now we come to the fun issue of the wonderful “auto correct” feature now found on most smart phones like the iPhone. This is a great feature, make no mistake, it’s awesome. I love how it auto completes really long words so that I don’t have to type them myself. The only problem is that it tends to come up with some innovative and sometimes rather embarrassing words that you certainly never meant to write. Just Google sites such as autocorrectfail.com and damnyouautocorrect.com to see what I’m talking about! The rule here is this, PROOF READ!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Not once but twice and three times!!!!!!! The only way to escape embarrassing auto corrections is to check what you’ve written BEFORE you press SEND! This works very well. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve typed a message thinking it’s perfectly fine, but being the proof reading psycho freak that I am, I go back and check it, and find a word or words that really did not look good and would’ve been rather embarrassing to say the least and I thank my obsessive nature each time for taking the time to check it before pressing SEND!
So if you’ve read this far and are still here I commend your perseverance! And what is the lesson of my rather long post today? Learn proper English people, learn when to use proper words, know when abbreviated text and acronyms are appropriate and when they’re not, and most of all, before publishing, sending or posting anything: PROOF READ your work and give people like me some respite from the constant bombardment of silly mistakes and bad English!
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