Poor spelling

[muses_nightmare]

This more specifically pertains to teenagers and younger who simply do not bother to spell anything properly. A typo now and then sure, but to not be able to write out the most basic sentence, it boggles my mind. My step-sister is especially bad for this, her facebook statuses make me cringe every time (and sometimes not just for the spelling!). She constantly spells Know as no, and sense as sence, and any number of other random misspellings and netslang.

Her misspellings are not even the part that bothers me the most, it’s the fact that it seems like no kid can spell anymore. They don’t even try it seems, and it’s really sad. Being even moderately intelligent seems to be going out of fashion, less and less kids seem to be reading actual books (after all what else can account for the popularity of the glorified fanfic that is Twilight). I’m sorry, maybe I was a nerd in school, but by grade 4 I was reading White Fang and The Call of the Wild, my favorite book at that time was The North Runner by R D Lawrence (I read and reread that book for the 4 years I was in elementary school), I don’t consider myself any type of super intelligent person, I just find it sad that my fourth grade reading skills were better than a lot of 10th graders now, and I’m only 22.

It’s just been aggravating me lately because my step-sister’s and a couple other younger peoples’ status updates have just gotten worse and worse. Hell there are people I went to school with and are the same age as me who just don’t try. I hate deciphering these things. Yahoo answers is also bad for this, there was one question I read recently that I could not understand, at all, I even sent it to a friend, and she had no idea either. Whatever happened to spelling lists?


(as a disclaimer, if you see any of these: É è in my posts, it’s because my keyboard is screwed up when I try to type apostrophes and question marks and a couple other punctuation marks.)

[McDreidel09]

Oh sugar, I know what you mean. I'm only 18 and I was in the same boat as you when I was little. I have a few people on my fb, whose statuses are just atrocious. The word 'lose' is becoming misspelled more and more. People write it as 'loose'. My senior year,one girl had a shirt she made and she spelled 'lose' as 'loose'. It was very embarrassing to say the least.

It is pure laziness. It takes a few seconds to run a spell checker or have someone else proofread it. When I become an English teacher, the kids are not going to like me because I will be very critical of spelling and punctuation.

[KellyHabersham]

Unfortunately, my daughter seems to be one of those people......there's been quite a few times when she's sent me a text message which I couldn't understand because her spelling was so bad.

And on a less personal level, it's happened before that I've been chatting with someone online, and had them get very irate with me for asking if they had a learning disability or if English was their first language. (this being when that person's spelling made it difficult to understand what they were typing.)

[HYHYBT]

Eye dun no cuz i kant spel neethir

Drive me up the wall (and across the ceiling and back down the other side).

But there is something related that also irks me, though it's punctuation rather than spelling: When I was in school, we were taught that lists containing more than two items and joined by a single conjunction got a comma after each noun, including the one before the conjunction(as in 'mustard, ketchup, onions, and pickles.') Now you almost always see it without the last comma (mustard, ketchup, onions and pickles,) which, besides being contrary to how I was taught, seems wrong logically because it leaves the last two tied together in a way the rest of the list isn't. Is this a change in the correct use of commas, or was I taught wrong, or do people nowadays just hate wasting that extra keystroke or something?

[Greenday]

Is this a change in the correct use of commas, or was I taught wrong, or do people nowadays just hate wasting that extra keystroke or something?

It's a change in the correct usage of commas. We were taught that it is now acceptable to either use it or leave it out.

But besides spelling errors, the things that piss me off the most is when people TYPE LIKE THIS FOR THEIR ENTIRE POSTS or when people TyPe LiKe ThIs BeCaUsE iT sOmEhOw MaKeS iT cOoL. First off, that's even harder to read than caps lock. Second, that takes forever to do. Why do it?

[BlaqueKatt]

Is this a change in the correct use of commas, or was I taught wrong

there is no "correct use" just general guidelines that change o'er time

Nice article here about it. Goes into the history, most people couldn't read and were read to, so punctuation was simply used as "breathing breaks"

[Lace Neil Singer]

Not just spelling, but the following also irk me:

1. Grammar; not just Grandad's wife. I've seen so many people posting on forums and not using capitals, full stops or commas.

2. Holy run on sentence, Batman! This is particularly irritating, when a person just posts a sentence that goes on and on and on and on and on... O_o

3. Stealing the Great Wall Of China. Paragraphs are your friend.

4. "Witch" for "Which"; "There" for "Their"; "Ma/Mah" for "My"; "Your" for "You're"; "It's" for "Its"; "Wit" for "With"; "Jus" for "Just"; "Im" for "I'm".

I'm not really a nitpick, honest. Just that so many people do this, and it just makes their posts unreadable. Also, if I'm reading a post by someone who's posting in this manner, it doesn't make me want to read any further; also, it makes me assume that the person is an imbecile.

[muses_nightmare]

1. Grammar; not just Grandad's wife. I've seen so many people posting on forums and not using capitals, full stops or commas.

2. Holy run on sentence, Batman! This is particularly irritating, when a person just posts a sentence that goes on and on and on and on and on... O_o

3. Stealing the Great Wall Of China. Paragraphs are your friend.

Oh good god, a friend of mine is so incredibly bad for that. Sometimes I actually have to edit her e-mails/messages before I can read them.

She types...like....this...sometimes with periods ..... between her sentences....and always,always,always types huge walls of text. She constantly tells her life story in e-mails. She was even going to do it to a potential landlord who had just asked the most basic information.

When I was in school, we were taught that lists containing more than two items and joined by a single conjunction got a comma after each noun, including the one before the conjunction

I was taught that too, I wasn't aware it had changed. I just thought that people didn't know how to use commas. (though admittedly I've been known to overuse them)

[lordlundar]

(as a disclaimer, if you see any of these: É è in my posts, it’s because my keyboard is screwed up when I try to type apostrophes and question marks and a couple other punctuation marks.)

Check your keyboard setting. Most keyboards you buy are a US style and should show up as "US" in the settings. The problem is sometimes it's get's switched to your regional setting instead, which causes the different characters. (Windows 7 has it on the task bar on the right hand side, XP you have to go into the Control Panel provided you did not select to have it on the task bar.)

[muses_nightmare]

Yeah, it fixed itself. I checked the regional settings and such, and everthing was fine there, so who the heck knows. It happens to my boyfriend's computer too occasionally, usually the only way to fix it is to restart. But thanks

[Stormraven]

I've been known to use ellipses in casual 'speech' via IM and the like, myself. For the rest, while I am, or try to be, reasonably tolerant of those who have innate difficulty spelling, it is difficult to remain so. If I get to the point where I'm feeling too intolerant, I get away from the computer for a while.

Online, I have no way of knowing who is being lazy and who is simply incapable of spelling properly, so I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

[jackfaire]

I am so anal about my spelling that when I was watching a show and the character said, "When I find a student that knows the difference between its possessive without an apostrophe and it's with an apostrophe ...." (Dr. Wilder Dawson's Creek Season 5)

After hearing that I had to research it just to make sure I was spelling it right; I know more of a grammar issue but for me they go hand in hand.

[lordlundar]

Yeah, it fixed itself. I checked the regional settings and such, and everthing was fine there, so who the heck knows. It happens to my boyfriend's computer too occasionally, usually the only way to fix it is to restart. But thanks

To end the problem permanently, go into Control Panel, region and languages, and select the tab for Keyboards and languages, then press the button for Change Keyboards. The new window that pops up will have a window on the bottom half that lists all the keyboard modes you have enabled (done automatically when you set up your machine. Select the one you don't want and select remove on the right hand side. Continue to do this until you remove all the ones you don't use or want.

[draggar]

You should see the tickets I get.

Now, I'll admit, I'm not the best speller (I love spell checker but I can't use FF at work) but some of it is just beyond belief.

"Computer got wet because the sailing was leaking"

And when I worked in retail:
"Phone freezzez"
"Antannaea is broke"
"Cuttin calls"

The sad part is that these are all from people who speak English as their primary.

[muses_nightmare]

Thanks, I'll check that out and see if it helps!