[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Beyle

The truly vast number of misspellings, or typos, as Worldwalker appeared to understand, can be attributed to several factors, but is nevertheless inexcusable.

No, it's not.

The standards for casual discussion on forums and professional writing are different. Which doesn't mean that typos and bad punctuation don't undermine your argument; they do, in showing that you're not immune to the appeal of instant gratification over quality, which takes longer. But that doesn't make your entire point null and void, and doesn't mean you've committed any great offense.

Anyway, there was no one around to correct it and I’m such a technological incompetent it wasn’t until yesterday that I discovered the “spell check” in place, or that I could enlarge the print slightly. Finally, as we say nowadays, I have vision issues. My apologies.

Firefox has spellcheck built into the browser, and ctrl-plus and ctrl-minus increase & decrease all the elements on a page, text and images.

Then there is the question of punctuation. Bill Goldman said his novels are mostly dialogue because punctuation is too confused these days. Cormac McCarthy doesn’t use quotation marks, hate’s semi-colons. Most of the best writers in our era won’t use an apostrophe after dropping, say, the last letter in a word, mainly the “g” in gerunds (dialect, of course). If you’re a formalist I recommend the first gorgeous half-page sentence with two commas in McCarthy’s OUTER DARK.

Your punctuation errors were not matters of style; they interfered with the message itself. Failing to put spaces around parentheses makes a sentence look cramped, and some browsers don't split the words if there's no space, so it can cause long white spaces at the ends of lines.

Also, authors who are writing 100,000 words of entertaining plot with fascinating characters can skip some of the punctuation requirements; many readers will not notice, and many who do notice won't care because they'll be thinking about the story. In a post of less than 1000 words, which isn't being read-and-absorbed but read-and-responded-to, punctuation is more important because minute sections of phrasing may be highlighted in the responses.

Yes, perhaps I should have applied the formal standard here although I’ve seldom found it useful and am far more inclined to write fiction on my own terms. I think I’ll stick with that. After all that, some of my best friends are curmudgeons.

Fiction style choices are irrelevant to textual conversation style choices.

I do have to say that I found Ms. Queentess’s ad hominem reference to my age a bit of a cheap shot. Not done, my dear, in the thinking classes,

Fascinating countershot, that, implying that she (and anyone who agrees with her assessment) are "unthinking."

What, exactly, are the "thinking classes?" Do they include a certain level of education, or a certain job set?

any more than you would use the pejorative words for various races, religious groups, gays... In fact, several older members of the WGA are now dividing seventy-two million dollars owed to them by the studios and various producers who have not only used that word but the implementation of it. Words, too, have consequences.

Oooh, we've achieved Hints Of Lawsuits. (Countdown to Godwin... 5... 4...)

Please, prove me wrong about this. Show that you can accept graciously that you ranted about low standards among readers while holding yourself to low standards as a writer, take your lumps, say oops, and move on.

I believe you’re also very wrong about the times you’ve never experienced, either in print or life evidently. There has never been a ruling group in this country remotely as cerebral (excluding the sciences) as that which created the Constitution.

There has never been a ruling group as limited to upper-class land-owning white males, wherein the definition of "cerebral" was defined as having a particular type of personal history, education, and philosophical outlook. People whose communication styles are drastically different from those are not necessarily "less cerebral."

<snip: waxing nostalgic about an era wherein US culture promoted an assumption that white European males had achieved the pinnacle of human literary talent.>

I don't believe that being able to quote Shakespeare or read Greek are indications of intelligence, artistic talent, or breadth of cultural understanding. I can deplore the mindless pap that entertains the masses without believing the foundations of that entertainment were somehow morally better than their application in pop culture.