Proof, proof, proof

[Ole Anderson]

Mini rant: Not so much on the Creek, but particularly on FaceBook: Do people ever go back and proof what they are writing? And not just responses to a thread, but I have seen the OP write a short question or comment that makes no sense what-so-ever, and is full of grammatical full-on goofs and obvious misspellings that spell check would find. And apparently it is improper to call anyone out on it or you are now the "spelling police". I cringe every time I see a "there" when they meant "their". So I have learned to presume that they are truly spelling challenged or simply don't know how to use the edit or delete tools provided, which is probably not a bad assumption as you almost need to have someone tell you how to find those tools the first time. My strength as an engineer certainly was not the use of the English language, but I learned to proof everything I did, whether it was a report, letter or email. Yet sometimes I go back and read something I wrote previously and wonder, how the heck did I miss that. We are all human.

And at some point I must have put "i" in my dictionary as an acceptable word. I wish I could figure out how to correct that one...

OK, I proofed this at least six times, wonder what I missed?

[Jim Becker]

Ole, a lot of folks post from SmartPhones and "Autocorrect" quite often does a number on things when folks are typing with their thumbs...and as you note, they rarely read things before hitting "post". And many folks don't realize that one can go back and edit out errors, too...

[Nathan Johnson]

For most, it's no longer important, and that's a shame.
It does not bother me in the least when someone gets upset when I point out their spelling errors. Language is important....be better.

[Grant Wilkinson]

Ole: Since you ask what you missed, I'll bring it to your attention.

You say, "My strengths as an engineer certainly was not". Your subject and verb do not agree. You can either say, "my strength as an engineer certainly was not", or "my strengths as an engineer certainly were not".

:):):)

[Al Launier]

idon'tknoitlokspretygodtome

[John K Jordan]

Good luck with changing that! Some people just don't care as long as their general idea or question gets through. Some people post from a phone with fat fingers and never seem to review. Some don't use a spell checker because it is annoying and they can't spell anyway. Some may not have English as a native language. Many may consider excellence in woodworking more importanter than excellence in communication. :)

Many are truely challenged with spelling, including me. A bit of dyslexia doesn't help things. I will spell some words wrong even after years of watching the spell checker correct them. I rely on the spell checker and always glance back over the message before I post unless the house is suddenly on fire. But as inferred by Grant's note, all humans make mistakes. I try to read everything I write carefully but still miss some errors. I especially look for combinations such as "your/you're", "there/their", "waste/waist", and "to/too" and for sentencences I started to edit then got distracted.

The ephemeral nature nature of some quick posts makes proofing seem a little less important.

My Android phone has a feature for removing words I added to my dictionary. Such tools are browser and word processor specific. For example, I searched with google for "editing spell checker word firefox" and it gave me some instructions.

Speaking of FaceBook, I used it for a few years then quit. Useful on occasion but overall a huge waste of time (See, an incomplete sentence, right out there in public!)

JKJ

[Mike Null]

There is a free app called Grammarly that will do spell check and grammar fixes.

[Ole Anderson]

Ole: Since you ask what you missed, I'll bring it to your attention.

You say, "My strengths as an engineer certainly was not". Your subject and verb do not agree. You can either say, "my strength as an engineer certainly was not", or "my strengths as an engineer certainly were not".

:):):)I wish I could say I intentionally left a kernel for someone to find. Thanks, went back and corrected it. Lots of my corrections happen after something is posted.

[Bert Kemp]

What really drive me nuts is the media. They make more mistakes then the General population. Almost every news article I read has spelling mistakes.:confused:

[Jim Koepke]

It is possible to edit a Facebook post? Please tell me more.

Proofing what is typed is old school for me. At one time my employment was in the printing trades. One old story is about the time we were filming a customer's artwork for a job. I mentioned to the production manager that one of the words didn't look right to me. At the time my spelling ability was atrocious*. He said the customer spelled it that way so it must be right. After we started printing the customer looked at it and was in shock that there was a misspelled word in the art.

During my high school years one teacher was especially verbose in the comments on my paper about how I misspelled the same word three different ways. My spelling has improved greatly over the years. My thanks for that go to a person who used to argue with me over our political choices. Often his only counter to my argument was that my spelling was off. As there are many well educated folks who say absolutely nothing worth the time of listening, there are as many less educated who can make brilliant statements with perhaps a bit less flair and polish. My response was to remove that avenue of the misspelled words argument from his arsenal.

jtk

*I may not have know how to spell it right, but if it looks wrong, it usually is.

[Nicholas Lawrence]

In my opinion autocorrect causes more problems than it fixes.

[Roger Nair]

Yes, Jim, Facebook posts can be edited. Place your curser in line with the top line and to the far right hand of the window. Three dots will appear, click on the dots and a menu box will come up. Select your choice of action.

[Jim Koepke]

Yes, Jim, Facebook posts can be edited. Place your curser in line with the top line and to the far right hand of the window. Three dots will appear, click on the dots and a menu box will come up. Select your choice of action.

Thanks Roger, I will have to give that a try on my next typo.

jtk

[Lee DeRaud]

Yes, Jim, Facebook posts can be edited. Place your curser in line with the top line and to the far right hand of the window. Three dots will appear, click on the dots and a menu box will come up. Select your choice of action.The depressing part is the huge percentage of people who think it works like text or email, resulting in an incorrect post, followed by a reply correcting it (usually with mistakes of its own), lather-rinse-repeat. You can even delete a post on FB, which apparently comes as a surprise to people who put a post on the wrong friend's page, then post an "oops, sorry" reply. The fact that the default setting is "return equals send" doesn't help a bit.

(My main beef with FB is the inability to do bold/underline/italic without dubious third-party apps, but that's another subject entirely.)

[Lee Schierer]

Now that I am retired, I do more and more reading of books than I ever did. I notice that some authors either can't spell or their proof readers/ editors need to go back to school. I find numerous misspellings and wrong use of words in the novels I read. I've even found books with duplicate pages.

[John K Jordan]

...I notice that some authors either can't spell or their proof readers/ editors need to go back to school....

It gets worse every year as authors become their own editors. When I told my wife about this thread she laughed out loud.

My Lovely Bride was a professional proofreader then an editor then a top manager in the scientific/technical publications field. We have collaborated on many things since I bought the very first version of Pagemaker for the orig IBM PC and a laser printer in 1987. She went on to a career in words while I made my career largely in graphics and images, both still and moving.

We have both lamented over the years at how the increasing access to personal word processing, presentation software, graphics software, digital cameras, and now self-publishing has resulted in deplorably lowered standards in both print, presentation, and video. Now that everyone can be author/proofreader/editor/illustrator/photographer/video producer there is no need to hire a professional at all. Those who do get professional results. Everyone else ends up with quality no higher than the level of their personal capabilities. Unfortunately, it is a rare person who can do it all well.

Yikes, I didn't get her to proof this. Oh well.

JKJ

[Jim Becker]

It is possible to edit a Facebook post? Please tell me more.

It's always been possible to edit a Facebook post...click on the little dots in the upper right corner of your post (whether you are the OP or are making a comment to someone else's post) and click on "edit"...you may need to hover your pointer for the three dots to appear. FB does mark your posts as "edited" after changing them, too.

[Perry Hilbert Jr]

auto correct doesn't change my words until I hit the space at the end of the word, so a word spelled correctly, isn't changed until after I have moved on to the next word. Extremely aggravating to say the least. Even more infuriating, is that sometimes it will let a word go just fine and change it in a later post. Worse yet, in some subjects with peculiar terminology, it will note the spelling as inaccurate but leave it intact and also later change the spelling. For instance, after about 300 times that I have spelled the word, "frizzen" is still notes the word as misspelled. I used the word "Cultch" yesterday and I thought I would go crazy getting it to stop changing the word. I tried to type the word "graupel" (a type of frozen precipitation) once and by the reaction, I expected the phone to burn up. even the spell check on my computer is telling me the word is spelled wrong, yet I know it isn't.

[Rick Potter]

I don't facebook, but I do text a bit, and I use the 'talk to text' on my phone. It often makes mistakes on words I speak. Maybe it is the same on facebook?

[Ken Fitzgerald]

I always proof read what I write. Quite often, I find grammar and spelling mistakes I have made when writing or responding to a post. I HATE "autocorrect" on my smart phone. Literally hate it. It makes far more mistakes than I do.

[Mike Chance in Iowa]

I had a wonderful teacher that drilled it into us that "If you can't send it out right, don't send it out at all." and really instilled proofing and double-checking our work. Once in the workforce, it was a hard pill to swallow when management forced us to ship out faulty software to hundreds of businesses knowing we would have to send out replacements in a few weeks once it was proofed and debugged.

I'm with the others above. It drives me nuts when I proof something on my smartphone and then when I press SEND it changes the text on me! It was correct before I hit SEND!!!!

[John K Jordan]

As far as I know, you can turn Autocorrect off on any device that uses it. I don't use it on my Android phone, my iPads, or other tablets. It is evil. Just google "autocorrect fails".

JKJ

[Myk Rian]

Ole, a lot of folks post from SmartPhones and "Autocorrect" quite often does a number on things when folks are typing with their thumbs...and as you note, they rarely read things before hitting "post". And many folks don't realize that one can go back and edit out errors, too...
I ran a BBS for 14 years before the Inet came around, and saw the same terrible grammer/spelling back then. Smartphones is no excuse for people spelling so bad.

[Jim Becker]

I ran a BBS for 14 years before the Inet came around, and saw the same terrible grammer/spelling back then. Smartphones is no excuse for people spelling so bad.
No disagreement with it not being an excuse. I was just pointing out part of the reason this happens in current times relative to technology...

[Yonak Hawkins]

I, like Lee, having retired, am reading much more than I used to. I have found the scientific and history books I read and the older books on my shelf are much more professionally published than the novels. I guess that shouldn't surprise me.

[Jim Becker]

Self-editing has unfortunately become a lot more common in fiction because self-publishing is about the only way for many authors to actually get published these days. And the issue with self-editing is that one is so familiar with the material that even simple grammatical (and sometimes spelling) issues pass right by the author's eyes because they are just so familiar with the writing. Almost everything I read these days is from authors who are faced with that. They are great writers and have wonderful stories and series, but the economics of it all have sometimes hurt in the details.

[Lee DeRaud]

Self-editing has unfortunately become a lot more common in fiction because self-publishing is about the only way for many authors to actually get published these days. And the issue with self-editing is that one is so familiar with the material that even simple grammatical (and sometimes spelling) issues pass right by the author's eyes because they are just so familiar with the writing. Almost everything I read these days is from authors who are faced with that. They are great writers and have wonderful stories and series, but the economics of it all have sometimes hurt in the details.There's another phenomenon I've seen with older authors (i.e. those whose books were originally published as, well, books) where the ebook edition is just plain horrible. My suspicion is that whoever currently owns the publishing rights just does an OCR scan of the hardcopy and stuffs it through a format converter to get a quick-and-dirty Kindle version...emphasis on "dirty". There are some where the author (or direct heirs) is still alive and everything is being handled by his/her "real" publisher, and those seem to be more or less ok. The real problem is dead authors whose book rights have changed hands multiple times and are no longer controlled by anyone who cares about the source material.

[John K Jordan]

...The real problem is dead authors whose book rights have changed hands multiple times and are no longer controlled by anyone who cares about the source material.

What do they care about then? Just money? Nooooo....

I've seen some really horrible ebooks and agree with your suspicion. Another problem is probably software. I get three SciFi periodicals on my Kindle - these are generated from the digital files they use to print the current paper editions so they should be right. However, I often see duplicated sentences, terrible handling of hyphens, and problems with white space between within stories.

JKJ

[John Sanford]

(Yoda voice) "Amusing thread is this."

Part of it is, as noted, technology. I had the fortunate experience as a yute of writing a LOT of papers for assorted English classes during junior and senior high school. Using typewriters. One reason I wrote so many papers is because I was always in the advanced English classes, largely the result of being a voracious reader. So, not only did I get lots and lots of work on grammar, the memory of a Ten Sentence Analysis still makes me shudder, but I also experienced the pain of having to retype entire pages due to errors. I learned to proof read.

I rarely, or more accurately, extremely rarely post anything from a phone. As someone who once could type 90wpm, the smartphone interface drives me nuts, so I don't use 'em to post.

All of that as background, I can agree with the OP that there are some posts (whether on a forum or social media) that are so terribly written that the first thing I do is check to see if the poster is likely using some translation engine. If the post looks like there may be some value, I'll ask for clarification. If not, then I'll move on. For lesser "challenges", I try to be charitable. If I can figure out what they're attempting to say, then I'll respond based on that. Of course, some folks do make it difficult to be charitable, in which case I may go full on grammar nazi / spelling commie.

There is a second aspect to this, namely the "democratization" of mass communication. Once upon a time, the vast majority of what we read had been through the various editors and proofreaders and such. Now, not so much. While it's very distressing to see "professional" writers churning out badly spelled ungrammatical dreck (sp??), a great many of the people we're reading now never aspired to be nor claim to be professional / skilled writers. 'Tis a two-edged sword. We get to read a lot that we'd never have encountered before, and some of it we dearly wish we never encounter again.

[Edwin Santos]

I also sometimes wonder whether teachers at the elementary and high school level enforce the accuracy of spelling and grammar in the way they did when many of us were that age. Maybe not, especially in our current system of standardized multiple choice tests.

Poor spelling and grammar can be annoying to the reader, but the real loser is the writer. At best, errors may have no consequence, but usually it reflects poorly on the writer. Rightly or wrongly, the words that come to mind are sloppy, lazy, uneducated, hasty. These are not the descriptors upon which to build in an increasingly competitive world.

In discussion forums and Facebook posts where there is a degree of informality you can cut some slack, but when you see poor spelling and grammar making it's way into professional documents, published work, journalism, etc., it's kind of depressing.

[Yonak Hawkins]

...the real loser is the writer.

..Not only for the reasons you cite but, also, because the inquirer may not get the most knowledgeable answers. If the query is too difficult to read, someone who has the best answer may not bother to read the rest of the post and reply.

It's too bad because all woodworkers, no matter skill or grammar level, deserve quality direction and answers but, unfortunately, there are so many posts that, sometimes, poor quality posts are passed over in favor of more appealing (or less offensive) posts

[John K Jordan]

I also sometimes wonder whether teachers at the elementary and high school level enforce the accuracy of spelling and grammar in the way they did when many of us were that age...

Years ago I had two boys in a private school. I dropped that school at the end of the term after notes from the TEACHER consistently came with poor grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

if tha teechr cant wriit; how"s she gonna be teechn the kidds to wriet ,?

[Art Mann]

I am afraid the command of the English language is so poor with some people that proof reading will not improve their posts. For example, if someone doesn't know the difference between "quite" and "quiet", no amount of proofing will help.

[Harold Balzonia]

Years ago I had two boys in a private school. I dropped that school at the end of the term after notes from the TEACHER consistently came with poor grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

if tha teechr cant wriit; how"s she gonna be teechn the kidds to wriet ,?

As a guy who spent a lot of my professional life in the education field, this makes me shudder. My kids are in public school (6th grade) and ever since they've been in kindergarten, every time the teacher (or principal, or other school entity) sends home a homework sheet/permission slip/ditto/instructions, with grammatical errors or blatant mistakes, I take a big, red Sharpie and correct the mistakes and send it back to them. I refuse to acknowledge those things sent home that haven't been proofed. I regularly send back homework assignments with corrections for the teacher. And Beelzebub help them if they send a letter home asking for money without first proofing the letter. When they do that, they get a colorful response.

The teachers/administrators always act embarrassed, but they don't seem to change their sloppy habits. Giving them corrections makes me feel better, if nothing else. And my kids learn from their teachers' mistakes.

One of my favorite tag line signatures from a member of an internet forum was "Typed, not proofed." I always appreciated that sentiment when it came to forum posts. Funny thing was, the guy almost never made a grammatical or typographical error....

[John K Jordan]

..."Typed, not proofed."....

Ah, nice. Preemptive excuse, covers everything!

[Ruperto Mendiones]

I, too, take great issue with misspellings and faulty grammar--in some instances the meaning of the author is obscured. But I still delight in applying the break to slow my bandsaw down. :)

[Lee DeRaud]

One of my favorite things is finding misspelled words and bad grammar in advertisements. That's right: companies pay good money to get their names and products in front of their desired market, and then look like idiots.

Latest example? Banner ad for Vectrix, right here on SMC, telling me how "poweful" their software is. I'm not sure what "powe" is, but their applications are apparently full of it. :)

[Art Mann]

I don't watch television but I do read the news on line from major networks. It is shocking how often these people who make a living crafting words make glaring mistakes. Have they no shame?

[Steve Eure]

I unsubscribed to our local rag newspaper recently, in part due to all the grammar errors in it. We were taught to always proofread our work. Sometimes things do slip by. In the newspaper's case, they should know better. Apparently the journalist nor, (I use this term lightly), the editor proofread their work anymore. Must not be too important to them. Our demographics in this part of the country leave a lot to be desired when it comes to education.
As the old saying goes,"dumbing down of America" is appropriate here.
!

[Yonak Hawkins]

Have they no shame?

I suspect it has more to do with money. With the emphasis on kowtowing to the owners, i.e., more money for them, proofreaders are superfluous. With fewer employees, everyone has more to do, leaving less time for preventing the publishing of grammatical and syntax errors.

[Simon MacGowen]

The world has changed!

With thumb typing taking over keyboard typing, who cares about typos and grammar in a forum setting.

I went with a friend to see his lawyer for their first meeting the other day. A young lady in her early 30s...by the time we left, she had not handed out any business cards of hers! That was supposed to be the first thing professionals or businesspersons (see, I did not use businessmen) did back in the old days when they first met.

During my time, "Dear so-and=so" was the way to address the other party by mail; hers (by email)? Hi....

So I no longer cringe even when I see grammatical errors made by journalists in newsprint.

Simon

[Ole Anderson]

Sure I cringe with easily misspelled words and grammatical errors, but what me shake my head is when someone posts a comment or idea, which when you finish reading it, you have no idea what they are trying to communicate to the world. Often makes me wonder their state of sobriety at the time of the post. I will freely admit to relying on spell check to fix my fumble fingered typing mistakes, red-lining words that don't compute. I rely on a right-click to give me choices that at once become obvious. Now if I could just find my PC's dictionary and remove that "i" that got accepted as correct... Anyone? Where is the dictionary for this forum? Residing on my computer somewhere I bet.

[Mel Fulks]

[QUOTE=Simon MacGowen;2755606]The world has changed!

Yep, but young women will never be giving out cards at the high rate men do.

When I started using a computer and sending email I was surprised by lack of established salutations, but I quickly accepted it as the norm.

I can remember when people from one section of the country could not easily understand the speech of those from a different section.

There are schools now to help people lose their accent in order to seem "more professional". I'm agin' it.
And some word letters the Oxford says are silent ...are now being pronounced by TV people. I'm against such silliness.

[Roger Feeley]

Ole, a lot of folks post from SmartPhones and "Autocorrect" quite often does a number on things when folks are typing with their thumbs...and as you note, they rarely read things before hitting "post". And many folks don't realize that one can go back and edit out errors, too...
I can’t resist sharing my favorite autocorrect story:
I was a programmer working with PCs. The email app did an automatic spell check when you clicked send. It would scan your text and ask you to approve each correction. When the process was complete the email would be sent.

I was composing an email to be sent up my chain of command including the Chief Operating Officer.

The sentance was, “For this project, I will need at least a 286 or perhaps a Pentium.”

Admittedly, I wasn’t paying close attention when I approved the last spelling change. As sent, the sentance became:

“For this project, I will need at least a 286 or perhaps a Penis.”

My boss just about fell out chair laughing. The COO replied simply, “Approved.”