A small request

[AdamJ]

I'm making this request because I feel sure that others here have the same issue. I'm highly dependent on proper English usage, especially grammar and punctuation, to understand what I'm reading. For example, if capital letters and full stops are omitted, I can't tell where sentences are meant to begin and end, often making it impossible for me to discern the meaning of what I'm reading.

 

I would like to ask people to try to remember not to cut corners when typing a message and instead use correct punctuation and grammar to enable more of us to understand what has been written. I realise not everyone here is able to do this but if you can, it would be really appreciated. :-)

 

Thank you.

 

Adam x

[trekster]

That is a big request for me. Im also dyslexic so im unable to comply with your wishes.

[AdamJ]

That is a big request for me. Im also dyslexic so im unable to comply with your wishes.

 

I did say that I realised not everyone would be able.

 

Anyway, I understood your message so that's good. :-)

[Tally]

We do already ask that people post using proper English (as opposed to, say, text speak).

 

Other than that, the grammar police are not in operation here.

[Lilypad]

I understand what you mean. I sometimes find it hard to read messages when people make spelling mistakes etc. But, I suppose they can't help it if they have a reading disability.

 

The one thing that I am trying to get used to is the use of abbreviations here. I get so confused when users refer to their "DS" or "DD" and I am even more confused when somebody will post something about their "DS playing on his DS" But that is just me and i'm not going to complain about it. However, I do not wish to use the abbreviations as I really dislike abbreviating anyway.

[Mumble]

the grammar police are not in operation here.

I have a suspicion there may be another mod who occasionally digresses into this role...

 

.i always make sure i use full stops at the beginning of sentences, capital letters at the end, and i spell cheque everything i righT

[AdamJ]

 

Other than that, the grammar police are not in operation here.

 

 

Nobody's asking for grammar police, just some recognition that AS can make it impossible to understand written text if the mistakes in it demand interpretation skills that many of us simply don't possess.

[justine1]

No offense,but some people have more time on their hands than others.I cannot possible concentrate on making sure my posts are of the same quality as my university essay's.I have four children single mother with no outside help,I work shifts for placements(for example I have just done two night shifts and going for an 8 hour shift tomorrow at 7.30am) in between that I have to write two 1500 word essay's.

 

When I come here and want to rant or ask for advice I may only have 15min tops to get my point across,thats all I am coming here to do not to make sure I get an A+ for my posts.

 

Sorry!

[Archie]

I do try to stick to the Queens English whenever possible, however sometimes my fingers move a little slower than my brain does. I have been known to miss words occasionally.

[baddad]

No offense,but some people have more time on their hands than others.I cannot possible concentrate on making sure my posts are of the same quality as my university essay's.I have four children single mother with no outside help,I work shifts for placements(for example I have just done two night shifts and going for an 8 hour shift tomorrow at 7.30am) in between that I have to write two 1500 word essay's.

 

When I come here and want to rant or ask for advice I may only have 15min tops to get my point across,thats all I am coming here to do not to make sure I get an A+ for my posts.

 

Sorry!

 

Well, I'm sorry - you'll not be getting anything close to an A+ with the above! I think you possible need to concentrate a bit more, even if you are four children single mother with no outside help......

Very best with those essays, BTW - I've been putting off writing one all week that's due on Thursday. Amazing how interesting cleaning the cooker, or sorting the recycling can seem when you've got an essay to write on a subject that bores you senseless, ennit!

 

Adam J - I do take your point about typos etc, but honestly think if you've managed to negotiate typos etc for forty years plus prior to diagnosis then you're probably more equipped to 'cope' with the odd annoying typo/grammatical error than some forum users are equipped to provide posts to your exacting standards. For some, like Justine, that may be a time thing, for others like trekster, it might be a practical thing and for others like me and mumble (and, no, that should not be 'mumble and I' That said, she does deserve a Capital M at the very least!) it could be we just can't be bottomed (the swear box here won't let me say arsed)...

Hope you'll appreciate that I've my tongue in my cheek for 'good' reasons and that I'm not underestimating how irritating this issue might be for you - I just think you need to consider the wider view on this one, and accept, as I've said, that it's probably easier for you to negotiate some ruff speling and poor kapitalisation and stuff than it is for some users not to make those errors.

 

L&P

 

BD

 

Oh - PS - the swear box did let me say arsed after all! It must be the 'd' that confuses it!

Edited February 5, 2011 by baddad

[Kathryn]

I have a suspicion there may be another mod who occasionally digresses into this role...

 

Oi! You dissin me or wot???

 

The last thing we would want to do is deter people from posting because they're worried about mistakes. I think people do their best and nobody sets out to deliberately make their posts incomprehensible (oh no - was that a split infinitive???!! )

 

I do take your point though Adam. Spelling mistakes aren't usually a barrier to understanding, but text can be very difficult to interpret if it's not punctuated at all, especially if it's one long paragraph with no breaks. That can be visually offputting and if people have to make an extra effort to work out what the text actually says they probably just won't bother to try and read it. I find it difficult to read such posts - if you have dyslexia or visual impairment or English is not your first language it must be near impossible.

 

Full stops, capital letters and paragraphs are not an optional embellishment, they do show where chunks of thought begin and end, so they help the reader to quickly grasp what you're saying. But even if correct punctuation is impossible, I think everyone who is capable of typing can at least hit the return key every few sentences to break up the text. That would help enormously!

 

K x

[Shrinking Violet]

I concur. If the text is just one long block, with the punctuation sprinkled over later, like vermicelli, then that's when I have problems. I do, of course, completely understand about dyslexia (I have a mate in Wigan who is SEVERELY afflicted; she sent me a text the other day, and she'd spelt 'received' correctly, so I had to text her back and tell her - she didn't believe me! )

 

The ironic thing was, when I was about 9, Sister Kevin, my headmistress, told my mother I was severely dyslexic and would require remedial English tuition. To this day, I have NOT THE FOGGIEST why my mother went along with this; she has (or had, I think her prehistoric tape player finally munched it!) a recording of me, aged 3, reading to her - and I mean I was reading to her, not her spelling out the words for me to imitate.

 

I could write my own name - including my middle name - BEFORE I started in nursery and I remember my Reception class teacher becoming increasingly flustered when she couldn't find anything I couldn't read! She never had anything to write on the 'words I can't pronounce' card. By the time I finished the infant school (aged 7/8) I had a reading age of 14/15. When it came to leaving after 6th form, a classmate wrote in my leavers' book that, when we were in Reception, she'd asked me how to spell something (I think we were writing about what we'd done at the weekend, so it might have been something like 'Saturday'). She told me that I'd spelt it out 'ess-ay-tee' as opposed to phonetically.

 

As I think I might have said before, it wasn't until I was 15, when my English teacher (who WASN'T a nun, thank gods!) realised how stupid it all was - she couldn't get SKev to agree, though! So I went through two-thirds of my school career basically labelled as stupid!

 

I do have to admit that I am something of a pedant myself, but I PROMISE I'll TRY to keep it under control! I can't see many of my pet peeves cropping up here, as most of them are somewhat obscure (mostly involving the correct pluralisation of words we've borrowed from Latin and Greek - can't help it, I did Classics! )

 

Sarah

[AdamJ]

 

Adam J - I do take your point about typos etc, but honestly think if you've managed to negotiate typos etc for forty years plus prior to diagnosis then you're probably more equipped to 'cope' with the odd annoying typo/grammatical error than some forum users are equipped to provide posts to your exacting standards. For some, like Justine, that may be a time thing, for others like trekster, it might be a practical thing and for others like me and mumble (and, no, that should not be 'mumble and I' That said, she does deserve a Capital M at the very least!) it could be we just can't be bottomed (the swear box here won't let me say arsed)...

Hope you'll appreciate that I've my tongue in my cheek for 'good' reasons and that I'm not underestimating how irritating this issue might be for you - I just think you need to consider the wider view on this one, and accept, as I've said, that it's probably easier for you to negotiate some ruff speling and poor kapitalisation and stuff than it is for some users not to make those errors.

 

 

BD, I think I must have understated my issue. It isn't about annoying typos. I might be a rigid thinker but I'm not a pedant. It's only recently that I've become aware that my comprehension difficulties aren't universal. Pre-dx, before I'd ever heard of AS, I presumed everyone had similar difficulties to mine. That's partly why my grammar is pretty good: it betrays a lifelong misconception that only correct English usage will be understood by others. I now know this isn't the case. The forsaking of normal rules, especially in internet and email communication, evidently causes difficulties for nobody except me! It isn't merely irritating and has nothing to do with pedantry; for me, it can be a major barrier to comprehension. We can all struggle to make sense of, for example, long streams of consciousness with no construction or punctuation. However, I can have genuine difficulties with much less obvious deviations from regular usage. I've coped for the last forty years mainly by asking for help.

 

My request wasn't intended for members who aren't able or don't have time but rather for those who, as you put it, can't be arsed. Anyway, given its unpopularity, I'll drop it and just muddle on as before.

[DaisyFulkirk]

Maybe we can make it clearer about what someone can do specifically to make sure that everybody can read their posts?

 

For example, one of the biggest things for me is using carriage-return (that is another name for the enter button and it comes from when people used typewriters) to put space in their post so that there are not more than maybe 6 lines (or five or seven) and then a space. That breaks up the writing and I don't think it would make it harder for someone writing to do that, but it makes it a lot easier to read - so not very much effort put in but lots of benefit gained.

 

The next biggest thing is not changing the font, size or colours of the writing in a post. It is different if it is in your signature because people can ignore or turn those off easily.

 

One of the things I know that I do too much, that can make my writing harder for other people to read, is putting extra bits in brackets in a lot. My learning support tutor said that you can do it with maths because that's a formula that people learn to deal with the same way each time, but language and writing are so much more complicated that it does not work as well.

 

I try to concentrate on making sure that my writing is clear and easy for everybody to read because I do not want anybody to feel excluded because of how I write not being accessible to them. I did some reading about writing documents in an Easy Read format last year and while I am not trying in particular to write in an Easy Read way now, I have ‘taken on board’ some of the things it said and I think that I write better as a result.

 

I can write at an academic graduate standard but it is very, very hard work, I need a lot of help to do it and I am very tired afterwards. Also my support worker said it makes my talking sound as if I have eaten a textbook during times when I am working on a formal piece of writing! I do not think that anybody wants or expects that standard of writing on a message board and I also do not think that it would be any more accessible and probably actually less accessible than when people just write basic clear English.

 

If my writing is hard for someone to read, please could you tell me and explain why if you can, because I would like to make it better.

 

I'm sorry that this is a long post!

[Mumble]

Well said Daisy and I completely agree with your two points - I know sometimes mods have asked (or done it for them) members to split up a long chunk of text to make it more manageable and more likely that other members will respond.

 

I agree with the changing colours/fonts (except for instance for particular effects mainly in off-topic topics, birthday messages etc) - I use a coloured overlay and if people change the colour, their message completely disappears on my screen! However, as I know this is a problem for me, if I really need to rectify it, I know I can either remove the filter to read that message or copy it into notepad and read it in normal text - it's not a big deal to find ways round things on one-off occasions.

 

Adam - I don't know if you use other forums - I do, and I have to say, the writing on this is a LOT easier to read than many others.

[bid]

BD, I think I must have understated my issue. It isn't about annoying typos. I might be a rigid thinker but I'm not a pedant. It's only recently that I've become aware that my comprehension difficulties aren't universal. Pre-dx, before I'd ever heard of AS, I presumed everyone had similar difficulties to mine. That's partly why my grammar is pretty good: it betrays a lifelong misconception that only correct English usage will be understood by others. I now know this isn't the case. The forsaking of normal rules, especially in internet and email communication, evidently causes difficulties for nobody except me! It isn't merely irritating and has nothing to do with pedantry; for me, it can be a major barrier to comprehension. We can all struggle to make sense of, for example, long streams of consciousness with no construction or punctuation. However, I can have genuine difficulties with much less obvious deviations from regular usage. I've coped for the last forty years mainly by asking for help.

 

My request wasn't intended for members who aren't able or don't have time but rather for those who, as you put it, can't be arsed. Anyway, given its unpopularity, I'll drop it and just muddle on as before.

 

Don't feel like that Adam <'>

 

I think it's perfectly fair to expect a general standard of basic grammar (capitals, full stops, etc) and plenty of spacing rather than a huge block of text. And I think almost everyone here does present their posts to that universal standard.

 

Bid

[Kathryn]

Adam I absolutely understand where you're coming from and thank you for having the honesty to say it.

 

Everyone should aim to make their posts as clear as possible to as wide a range of people as possible - and it's not just an AS issue, as I said in my previous post, it affects others as well.

 

I find unpunctuated, unbroken "streams of consciousness" very annoying and I think it's inconsiderate to write in such a way. It also does the poster no favours as it virtually guarantees nobody will try to read it, let alone respond. It's the equivalent of speaking very fast all on one breath and in a monotone.

 

K x

[Mumble]

I find unpunctuated, unbroken "streams of consciousness" very annoying and I think it's inconsiderate to write in such a way. It also does the poster no favours as it virtually guarantees nobody will try to read it, let alone respond. It's the equivalent of speaking very fast all on one breath and in a monotone.

I'm not sure writing and speech can really be equated like this or if it's a fair comparison.

 

Writing can be done with a time-delay. You can type something (as a stream of consciousness if wanted) and then edit it before posting. You can go back and but in the grammar and punctuation to make it make (at least some) sense.

 

When you're talking with/to others, you don't have that possibility. You have to get it right first time.

 

I think this is probably why a number of individuals with ASD (myself included) prefer to write rather than speak, because then we have the time to think and get it right. We don't want to be annoying and it's not done purposely.

[RainbowsButterflies]

Writing can be done with a time-delay. You can type something (as a stream of consciousness if wanted) and then edit it before posting. You can go back and but in the grammar and punctuation to make it make (at least some) sense.

 

I think that's the point Mumble. IMHO, there is no reason for the unpunctuated stream of consciousness posts precisely because they can be reviewed before you hit the post button.

 

I can normally interpret spelling/grammar mistakes and typos although some grammar mistakes really bug me. However, there have been a few posts that I struggle to read because there are no capital letters or punctuation. Often I give up half way through which is a shame because the poster obviously had things they wanted to share.

[Kathryn]

I agree with you about the difference between writing and speech, Mumble.

 

I was just drawing a comparison between the effect on the receiver of a block of unpunctuated, unspaced writing and a long speech without any pauses or variations in tone. Communication - whether writing or speech - is much more easily understood when broken into chunks.

 

K x

[AdamJ]

Adam I absolutely understand where you're coming from and thank you for having the honesty to say it.

 

Everyone should aim to make their posts as clear as possible to as wide a range of people as possible - and it's not just an AS issue, as I said in my previous post, it affects others as well.

 

I find unpunctuated, unbroken "streams of consciousness" very annoying and I think it's inconsiderate to write in such a way. It also does the poster no favours as it virtually guarantees nobody will try to read it, let alone respond. It's the equivalent of speaking very fast all on one breath and in a monotone.

 

K x

 

Thanks

[AdamJ]

I'm not sure writing and speech can really be equated like this or if it's a fair comparison.

 

Writing can be done with a time-delay. You can type something (as a stream of consciousness if wanted) and then edit it before posting. You can go back and but in the grammar and punctuation to make it make (at least some) sense.

 

When you're talking with/to others, you don't have that possibility. You have to get it right first time.

 

I think this is probably why a number of individuals with ASD (myself included) prefer to write rather than speak, because then we have the time to think and get it right. We don't want to be annoying and it's not done purposely.

 

Hallelujah! Thanks.

Edited February 9, 2011 by AdamJ

[Mumble]

Communication - whether writing or speech - is much more easily understood when broken into chunks.

I guess that's the same as chocolate. Apparently that's much easier to digest if you break it into chunks first. I have never tried, so I have no evidence to support this.

[Eccentric]

Grammar is one of those things that some people care about, and some don't. Unfortunately some people (not me, I should add) get irritated when people complain about their written English, either because it reminds them of their schooldays, or because they're English and so associate it with class. Using correct grammar they think is 'posh'.

You either get it, or you don't.

 

I have a similar problem with spoken English. People think I'm a bit deaf because I often have difficulty understanding what they're saying, but the problem is I find it difficult to work out where one word ends and the next begins. Consequently, I'm hopeless at learning any foreign language, though I could probably learn to read and write one if I wanted to.