Pet Peeve

[hakeem.wolfie]

I don't know if this bothers anyone else as much as it bothers me, but I get so turned off when teases are written in poor grammar. It just makes it impossible to follow and I have half a mind to rewrite some of the teases that appear quite interesting, if only it weren't for the trainwreck grammar the author's used. Anyone else on board?

[omgimapotato99]

I don't really care as much as the text actually is understandable and makes sense. Don't care about small stuff like wrong usage of tenses or commas and stuff like these. I'm not very good at English myself and most likely won't notice these kind of mistakes anyways.
But sometimes there are some teases that you can't even understand what the author wanted to say... and that's annoying indeed.

[janmb]

I agree that poor grammar or language in general is a fairly significant drawback for webteases.

Not because it necessarily makes it hard to understand, but because, at best, it is a huge distraction.

It's pointless to get worked up over it though - I'm sure few authors write poorly because they want to spite the reader. It stems either from someone simply having troubles writing well, or as is often the case, being written by someone not having English as their language of birth. In both cases, the poor result is based on involuntary shortcomings.

This has been discussed many times before and usually with more or less the same result. The single good "fix" to poor grammar would be to have better tools when writing teases. Unfortunately that is not realistic or fair to expect since Nyx and this entire site is based on whatever time someone can and will put in on their spare time.

It would of course be prudent to advise authors to enter their text in any proper word editor including a spelling checker, and simply copy&paste from there into the webtease editors here on milo, and I'm sure a lot of authors already do so. Still, it's inconvenient and therefore unrealistic to hope all authors will ever do so.

[JustKrissy]

Poor grammar makes everything horrible, especially teases, period..

:(

[subhubby]

I agree with "hakeem.wolfie." I can cope with inadvertent misspellings, or even with an author's inability to distinguish between "your" and "you're," or between "their" and "there". It's the "text speak" language of run-on sentences void of punctuation that I can't bear. There have been many great tease ideas utterly ruined with run-on sentences, rendering the text torturous to parse.

Still, I don't think the problem has much to do with non-native English speakers. In my experience, the international students I work with may not be familiar with certain words, but they're very proficient with grammar - in many cases better with grammar than kids that grew up in the U.S.. This is simply a question of effort. The culture of instant text messaging seems to have licensed a pernicious lack of regard for grammar as something that actually enhances communication. I get email messages from students written in this "text speak" language. Personally, I think it's laziness on the part of the writer, and I find it difficult to take these people very seriously.

Now, you'll have to excuse me. Somebody just posted a very promising tease. Where's my Kleenex box??

[janmb]

Still, I don't think the problem has much to do with non-native English speakers. In my experience, the international students I work with may not be familiar with certain words, but they're very proficient with grammar - in many cases better with grammar than kids that grew up in the U.S.

True enough. As a non-native English speaker myself, with broad experience from MMOs and other online communities, the worst/most annoying mistakes are made by "natives" for sure. I guess there is some logic to it as well when you think about it... Although we have all lived with our native language from birth, we also take it a lot more for granted and pay far less attention to getting it right. When you learn and use a foreign language you are in my experience far more focused on using it right than you are in your own tongue.

I for one would never ever do a you're/your error, but I am more than capable of doing errors on equally lame level in my own tongue. That said, I doesn't help my case that I use English a lot more than my own tongue either I guess.

In the end of the day, getting grammar and spelling right these days is a matter of effort - nothing else. Even a dyslectic should be able to get pretty darn close to perfection, given the number of easily available tools that literally write stuff for you...

[les]

there used to be two forms of English,

"Academic", as taught in educational establishments.
"Colloquial" as taught on the streets

Now you can add
"Text Speak" as used on mobile phones.

I have given several times websites and programs for spelling and spell checking.

Even Firefox has dictionaries available for spell checking.

[omgimapotato99]

I use spell checker on my browser all the time I write something in English. Otherwise I would probably not be better than blind eyed monkey with box gloves on. In fact, while I wrote these three sentences I made at leas 4 spelling mistakes. Nothing to be proud of, I know...
But people are not perfect. Everybody can't be good at English. You have to bear with hem. I'm not good either, but I'm at least trying.