Hooray! I’ve found the thread where people talk about accuracy in writing. I am someone who sees every typo, every grammar glitch, every confusion of ‘their’, ‘there’ and ‘they’re’, every ‘flaunt’ that should be ‘flout’, every single ‘to’ that should be ‘too’ as if they were six feet tall in flaming red letters with a huge arrow pointing to them bearing the words ‘Why are you here?’ It’s a handicap, I know.

I make the errors myself. But I fix them all when they aren’t deliberate. (I started a sentence with a conjunction. Deliberately. And I have sentences with no verb. Nothing wrong with that. If you know what you’re doing. ) This is only my third post on this site (not ‘sight’ ) but the first two have had five after-post edits between them.

Those who don’t proofread, or don’t get their work proofread (yes, they are spelt the same but pronounced differently) are torturing the rest of us. Why do I think I am justified in saying this? Because writing is intended to communicate.

Spelling a word roughly correctly does most of the job. Mostly you can read it. In fact get the first and last letters in the right place and most of the other letters there in some order or other and almost every native reader of English can tell what you mean. However, to those who know how something should be spelled (yes, it was ‘spelt’ somewhere above – both are correct) there is a moment when the concentration wavers. We are thinking about the error, not what was intended. The communication has failed slightly.

It is a similar effect on a smaller scale as if you were to say ‘fuck’ to my dear little white-haired old mother. (Yes, really. Most of my hair is white or thereabouts too.) She would hear everything said before the word, but would forget it all immediately and wouldn’t hear the rest of what you said at all. All she would hear would be ‘fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck…’. And she wouldn’t be happy, believe me.

When you typo or misspell or dyslex (No there isn’t such a word. I made it up.) I do carry on reading, but the more you do it, the closer I get to seeing ‘wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong…’.

For those who have a genuine problem, I have every sympathy. But there is a solution. Get a proof-reader. Better still, get what jaeangel calls a beta reader. (Good term. I hadn’t seen it before.) A beta reader will check your work for everything that might be wrong with it and, ideally, send you a marked up version or a set of suggestions for things that might be wrong. Then you can decide whether to fix it or whether, like me, you want to break the rules in this case. (I would guess there are people who would say that I had misused ‘like’ and used the accusative ‘me’ to agree with the nominative ‘you’ in that sentence. I am, however, unable to think of a way to say that that reads right and doesn’t break those rules.)

I am willing to take on either the proof-reader or the beta reader job for anyone here who feels they need it. As to taste, I think simple rules – ‘no kids, no scat, no snuff’ – will do for me. I will even get a copy of Webster to check American spellin’ authoritatively if necessary. Contact me by private message here.


Or on the other hand you might just like to say ‘fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck…’ to me. ‘sokay

Spike

P.S. And sorry for including the footnotes in the text, this is a message board, not a typesetting suite.