Thanks, sbbe. I think you and I, and H. Dean, and Ruby, and Aussiegirl are pretty much in agreement actually. But what really pleases me is to see so many folk are actually willing to spend some passion on the issue.

I understand that most of us who write for pay (as often as possible, right? lol) spend extra effort to make certain that everything we submit is "just so" because a paycheck might be in the offing ... but writers who read and post to a thread like this one also have standards. And that doesn't mean necessarily stuffy.

I've kept a sentence as an extreme example of what offends me from a story I once tried to read (not here!) that said: "After I camd in her fac i still wanted fuckd her." (I read a few more sentences to see if it was an inept try at dialect. It wasn't.)

It is my opinion that, while someone is free to torture the language like that in the privacy of their own home, the exhibitionism of semi-literate drivel should result in the revocation of their poetic license and death by computer virus.

hJ