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 generalAODi 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.
stormmediaYou 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 Jrwith 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-sp34kand 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.
QuotingThis 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.
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?