Author Topic: Springtime for Engrish!  (Read 8661 times)

Sad Jari

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Springtime for Engrish!
« on: 2006-05-09 22:33:01 »
The last one has apparently lost its' powers, so it's the time to make another post about using proper English. By the way, it amazes me that I have to do this. That people really type like this.

It's - once again - most obvious in the Game Tweaking. Or "help my game wont work help lol"-forum, like I prefer to call it. There seems to be a new phenomenon this time in addition to horrible grammar, typing and IM-sp34k; unnecessary quoting.

As far as grammar and typing are concerned, dyslexic people and non-native English speakers have an excuse, sort of. Simpler things like capitalization and punctuation of (at least) some sort are something that everyone is capable of. And basics of sensible quoting... everyone with a half of brain should be able to do that correctly.

Being busy is not a valid excuse. Being lazy is not a valid excuse. Free speech most certainly is not a valid excuse. This is not an IRC channel or IM conversation - where most people I talk to actually produce better English than some do here in the forums - you have plenty of time. If you are so lazy that you can't be bothered to type something even remotely resembling English, why do you bother typing at all? And this forum is owned by someone, so you can take the free speech argument and shove it somewhere so deep that it will never come out.

Oh yes... typing like that most freaking certainly is not cool. I'll find and beat up the first person who suggests that as an excuse.


Time for some examples (posts were picked semi-randomly, I didn't try to find the worst ones).

Grammar and typing in general

AOD

Quote
i got errors when trying to patch it maybe can you put a zip file containing the files inside the .lgp's and for the people that have mods like the ummm advent children faces for the party menus because i value em and its a pain to find my install disk again so if this is possible it would help

What you say?

Not even a hint of punctuation or capitalization. It is readable with a moderate effort only because it's so short and rather simple text.

Come on, this is ridiculous. You seem type fairly well, so you most likely are capable of using grammar of some degree.


stormmedia

You are not a native English-speaker, are you? If that is the case, small typos are ok, but you should be able to do punctuation and capitalization, no?


Steve Jr

Quote
with any luck there should be a new Zack battle model in the next week or 2 which will hopefully look more like the zack out of FF7:Last Order(OVA) eyes included  all perty an stuff there is however one thing im gonna need and thats Kimerav5c because i had a harddrive failure losing all my previous work but nuf about my stupidness of not backing up

...what?

*sigh*

Getting repetitive. No caps, no punctuation, interesting grammar (what's left of it, that is).

I'm sure you can do better.


IM-sp34k

Quote
and now this groupe is gone and I was stuck with the site lol .. so I changed the site to stormmedia ... witch didn't work either lol ..

Oh dear God. What kind of a word is "lol"?

And what the heck is it doing in a forum post?

Quite handy in an IM-conversation, sure. But in a forum? Rather borderline, and when it usually just happens to be used by a person who doesn't seem to give a damn about grammar either, it comes across really badly.

Sure, it's okay to use it now and then, if you really want. Using it in every post, or even several times per post is bit too much, though.


Quoting

This one seems fairly recent, usually people have been pretty good with quoting.

Entire (although not very long) post for a single line reply. Half of that line being IM-sp34k.

Please don't tell me that you quoted an entire post with few thousand pixels of images (vertically) for a single line reply. Please?

Entire post. For a single line reply. Which barely makes sense.

God damn it, I thought that rules for sane quoting were established when Usenet was the big thing, so they shouldn't be anything new.

Here's some netiquette for you.

Quote
Delete Irrelevant Quoted Text

Whichever way you quote, it's worth putting in a little effort to delete any quoted text that you're not going to respond to. If the writer does this then the reader doesn't have to guess which bit of text they are responding to and which bits are irrelevant, but can see it immediately.

There is another advantage in that it makes posts shorter, and thus quicker to read. Arguments about network bandwidth are somewhat relevant, since some readers still pay by the byte; but I consider human time - "eyeball bandwidth" - much more important. It's annoying paging through hundreds of lines of quoted text to discover that the poster has written a single line of agreement, disagreement, abuse or whatever at the end.

Quoting signatures (the fixed text at the end of the article) is worth mentioning as a specific example of needless quoting. The previous poster's signature is almost never relevant to what the followup says, so it's wasteful (for the above reasons) to quote it.

Does that make sense to you?

Or if you are just addressing the person in general, just put his name in the beginning of your reply, like so:

"Sad Jari: You are mean. :(".

Those were just examples. It doesn't mean that the rest of you are exempt from these rules, these posts were just among the worst and the first ones I found.


And why should you pay attention to your writing?

Because:

a) Writing like an idiot makes you look like an idiot.
b) Proper English is much faster to read.
c) There's much smaller risk of misunderstanding with proper grammar.
d) Writing decent English shows that you respect the people who read your messages and the owner the forum.


Like Jules said in Pulp Fiction (and I apologize for my language): English motherfucker, do you speak it?

Pulp Fiction is cool movie and Jules is cooler than Fonzie. You wouldn't want to be uncool, would you?

Please?

Pretty please?

Covarr

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Re: Springtime for Engrish!
« Reply #1 on: 2006-05-09 23:39:21 »
This is the best topic ever.

I was half tempted to quote your entire article just to say that.

Edit: You should also include a complaint about the following scenario:

Quote
Quote
Quote
Quote
I want to play a game. :-D
What would that be? lol
How about backgammon
That sounds like fun
Quote
Or maybe checkers.
I like that too.
« Last Edit: 2006-05-09 23:58:06 by Covarr »

Relf

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Re: Springtime for Engrish!
« Reply #2 on: 2006-05-10 00:40:05 »
Jari, I still get the feeling that this is pointless, as they want help, not to catch up on forum gossip. The majority of them will never see this post. Perhaps, as a solution, we stop helping the people who don't care to type in a manner that conforms at least moderately to the english language?

L. Spiro

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Re: Springtime for Engrish!
« Reply #3 on: 2006-05-10 05:49:19 »
This is why I stopped looking at that forum.

If you need another reason for proper typing:

e) Once care-bereft typing takes over the forum, the people who actually matter—the people who make the forum great—start seeing the place going to trash and stop coming around.  Add the increase of sloppy typing to a decrease in meaningful typing and the forum as a whole degenerates completely, losing all meaning, value, and respect it once had.

Your sloppy typing is turning this place into a joke.
Fine way to treat a person who tries hard to uphold a standard and maintain a the only meaningful forum for one of the best games ever made, don’t you think?
It’s like he went out of his way—took time from his life—to bake you a cake, and all you did was take your slice and throw it back in his face, then hide behind your own justifications (jump back to the real world from the analogy here) such as, “Oh, it’s just the Internet,” or, “I type like I speak, what’s the big deal?”.

What’s the big deal??
Why do you think speaking like an idiot means you can come around here and type like one too?
So what if it is just the Internet?  So what if it is just your thesis?  So what if it is just a report for your boss?  Got the idea?  The only reason people think it is okay to type like sh*t online is because no one else is checking their slop, and people revel at the chance to waste their brains.
Do you understand that that is all you’re doing?  You need someone else to keep you in check?  Huh?  Can’t do it on your own?
Not smart enough?  Not responsible enough?  Is it too much effort for you?  Yeah, I know how hard it is to occasionally hit Shift and “.”.  So hard.

To those who type like sh*t, your educations were wasted.
Your teachers didn’t grade your reports and check your spelling, grammar, and punctuation just so you could spend the rest of your lives burning the eyes of others, strangling others’ minds, and purposely trying to forget all their efforts.


L. Spiro



[Edit]
I spellchecked my post after posting it and found not a single error, neither in spelling nor in grammar.
How’d that feel?
[/Edit]
« Last Edit: 2006-05-10 05:51:37 by L. Spiro »

halkun

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Re: Springtime for Engrish!
« Reply #4 on: 2006-05-10 06:11:09 »
Bad spelling you say!

Lazy typing.

Could you imagine what kind of chaos would happen if a mod or somethig violated the english language on a regular basis, mush like Lucas violated my childhood memories of Star Wars with Episode I?

IN the ind I like to think that there are a disporopsonate number on non-english typers and sometims you have to wade though the cruft to get to what they are saying. It's a job, but in the end yo cn see which are the ones making an effort oad wich are simply 12 year olds who really need ay typing course.

Oh, BTW, i wote the abouve without touching the backspace key

and the last sentince too. ^_^

Sad Jari

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Re: Springtime for Engrish!
« Reply #5 on: 2006-05-11 18:09:05 »
:-D


Relf: Have you noticed that two out of the three people mentioned do post in Unrelated?

Yes, there are others, but the best way to affect them is to show good example. Something that is very difficult, if the big posters of Tweaking pay absolutely no attention to their typing.

Covarr: Ah, yes, the nested quote monsters. If I recall correctly, SMF can actually flatten such quotes automatically (although I don't know how it does it), if it's set to do so. :)

stormmedia

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Re: Springtime for Engrish!
« Reply #6 on: 2006-05-11 19:01:57 »
You are right I'm not a native english speaker and ... well sorry for the ponctuation and capitalization... I didn't realized that it was distrubing anyone so .... well I'll watch myself from now on.

Sorry again and see you !!!

Sad Jari

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Re: Springtime for Engrish!
« Reply #7 on: 2006-05-11 19:59:21 »
Thank you. :)

And you don't have to be sorry, one of the ideas behind these topics is to make people aware. Because sometimes - like in your case - people might do it just because it hasn't occurred to them that it might be a problem.

So, mission accomplished. :)

Relf

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Re: Springtime for Engrish!
« Reply #8 on: 2006-05-11 21:53:26 »
I would damn you, if I did not so enjoy the results. :-D

James Pond

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Re: Springtime for Engrish!
« Reply #9 on: 2006-05-11 22:53:33 »
Oh, BTW, i wote the abouve without touching the backspace key

and the last sentince too. ^_^

Maybe not backspace, but what about delete? ;)

Lazybones

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Re: Springtime for Engrish!
« Reply #10 on: 2006-05-31 23:51:41 »
You know, I understand what you're saying here.  And I understand the degenerative effect it can have on a forum.  What I don't understand is getting as angry about it as some of you seem to.  I imagine an angry mob with pitchforks and flaming torches destroying the homes and villages of the thread posters who use poor punctuation and grammer.
Granted, it can be difficult to make out what some of the (seemingly pre-teen) posters are trying to say.  And the point about quotes is very true and well-founded.  But let's take a deep breath and calm down a bit, eh?  There are much larger problems in life and on the internet which are far more worthy of righteous indignation.
I'd greatly appreciate a lack of flames for my post, thanks.

Sad Jari

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Re: Springtime for Engrish!
« Reply #11 on: 2006-06-01 00:28:09 »
I would so dig up the previous thread about grammar and spelling, if it still existed. And the one before that. And the one... you get the point.

Asking. Nicely. Does. Not. Work. Been there, tried that. Several times.

And quite frankly, many - not all, but many - of these masters of English are not that great additions to the forums, so if they manage to get all insulted because I point out that their writing suxx0rs... not a great loss.

Certainly there are all kinds of problems. But this is one problem where we can make a difference. And being less of a problem than... child abuse for example, does not mean that it should be accepted.

What's with the request, anyway? I haven't flamed anyone in this thread, quite the opposite, this is me being nice and cuddly. :-D

By the way, allow me to point out nicely and cuddly...ly? and in totally non-flaming way, that your post is on the borderline of being a thread resurrection.


PS. Grammar. Not grammer. Too good of an opportunity to pass up, sorry. Just teasing. :lol:
« Last Edit: 2006-06-01 00:31:51 by Sad Jari »

Emerald Weapon

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Re: Springtime for Engrish!
« Reply #12 on: 2006-06-01 00:31:18 »
You know, I understand what you're saying here.  And I understand the degenerative effect it can have on a forum.  What I don't understand is getting as angry about it as some of you seem to.  I imagine an angry mob with pitchforks and flaming torches destroying the homes and villages of the thread posters who use poor punctuation and grammer.

Jari's just saying what he thinks and he's saying it his way. And the thing is, he has a point. A very good and valid point. And you saw that point.

Why we get so "angry" about it? Well, I don't think we do. It's not like anyone of us sits behind his desktop smashing bunny-statues into the wall, because someone used bad grammar on the forums. But we do get annoyed. Highly annoyed at some times. And we respond and post accordingly.
It's just a complete pain in the ass to read another post by a new person on the forums, asking for help, that goes like this:

ey im new her on tha frmz i wnted to know if some of yu peeps culd tel me if its posible to use the chocobapatch wen te patch dusnt laik yu?

Tnx!

~~Retardmaster999~~

I'm not going to repeat Jari's entire post. But it sucks and it does indeed, like you said have a degenerative effect on the forums. That, and furthermore, the person will not have to expect that much help from anyone. So, by pointing this out we're doing him a favour in a way. Oh, and just for the record: we've tried being nice. That doesn't work. Not even remotely.

Granted, it can be difficult to make out what some of the (seemingly pre-teen) posters are trying to say.  And the point about quotes is very true and well-founded.  But let's take a deep breath and calm down a bit, eh?  There are much larger problems in life and on the internet which are far more worthy of righteous indignation.

Yes, there are more important things in life. Much more important things. However this forum is important in its own way to some people around here. And thus we care about the way things go around here and the quality of the board.

I'd greatly appreciate a lack of flames for my post, thanks.

I've been nice. Maybe someone won't be. How exciting!

Lazybones

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Re: Springtime for Engrish!
« Reply #13 on: 2006-06-01 04:18:12 »
(Quote with my own numbers inserted):
1.)  What's with the request, anyway? I haven't flamed anyone in this thread, quite the opposite, this is me being nice and cuddly. :-D
2.)  By the way, allow me to point out nicely and cuddly...ly? and in totally non-flaming way, that your post is on the borderline of being a thread resurrection.
3.)  PS. Grammar. Not grammer. Too good of an opportunity to pass up, sorry. Just teasing. :lol:
1.)  I know you havn't flamed anyone here, just trying to avoid being on the receiving end of such flames for offering a slightly different (though not really) perspective.  Thanks for not doing so.
2.)  I thought the limit for a board resurrection was 3 months.  Mine was only about a month away.   :-)
3.)  Crap, you got me.  If I'd looked at it before I posted, I would have caught that.   :wink:

zero88

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Re: Springtime for Engrish!
« Reply #14 on: 2006-06-02 20:03:55 »
ey im new her on tha frmz i wnted to know if some of yu peeps culd tel me if its posible to use the chocobapatch wen te patch dusnt laik yu?

Tnx!

~~Retardmaster999~~

Haha! Excellent!

Izban

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Re: Springtime for Engrish!
« Reply #15 on: 2006-06-03 13:58:36 »
From what you've posted about me, all I can say is, Long day + Drinking + ADHD = bad engrish/gamma

Sad Jari

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Re: Springtime for Engrish!
« Reply #16 on: 2006-06-03 14:06:25 »
Every time?

Check this, then tell me how many caps, periods or commas you see. :|

I'm not making fun of you... in fact quite the opposite, if your post meant that you'll try to improve, that's very good. :-)

Izban

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Re: Springtime for Engrish!
« Reply #17 on: 2006-06-03 14:28:14 »
           I'm up at 4:30 most mornings start work at 5:30 and finish at 10pm, I have 3 days a week off which for the most part I sleep, in the time I'm not sleeping  i generaly am trying to learn something.
ADHD you shoud know is a medical condition/ability which causes me to lose interest in things I'm doing quite frequently only to come back to it in a couple of minites with a completely different thought train, which helps me tackle problems differently to most people, which is how figured out how to combine 2 models for myself.

Sad Jari

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Re: Springtime for Engrish!
« Reply #18 on: 2006-06-03 14:42:50 »
I'm not going to ask what the heck you do with hours like that, I just hope that they pay you enough.

And yeah, I have some kind of idea what ADHD is.

Anyway, I'm seeing caps and punctuation now, and that makes me very happy.

Thank you.