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From: chabot@amber.DEC (Lisa S. Chabot)
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Re: Minor Catharsis
Message-ID: <3804@decwrl.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 1-Oct-84 17:26:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: decwrl.3804
Posted: Mon Oct  1 17:26:21 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 2-Oct-84 06:42:44 EDT
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Organization: DEC Engineering Network
Lines: 46

I agree with almost all of the points in Christian's letter, but not this one
entirely.

Christian W. Stassen  ==  >
> ...  people who pick someone else's article apart for spelling or grammar 
> mistakes are (all but) admitting that they can't really find anything else 
> in it weak enough to pick upon.

Not necessarily.  These grammer/speling (-: tee hee :-) fanatics might actually
be expressing a desire that the author do improve her/his writing, so that the
reader might then be *able* to understand the message that the author is
attempting to convey.  And some people use wrong words (even beyond the homonym
problems)--sometimes it's very hard to make out what is being said.

This is a written medium, and attempting to communicate in a it without 
attention to the even basic rules about sentence structure, or attention to
appropriate word choice, makes the effort seem ridiculous.  In this view, then,
a flame on the order of "Your sentences don't make sense" can actually be
interpreted to mean "Your sentences don't even make sense--you're clearly a
fuzzy thinker".

---

Typographical errors do count--any experienced programmer knows this.  (-: gee
what happens when you treat your compiler like you treat the net--it barfs at
you when you misspell things :-)  On the other hand, many of us are admitted
human beings, and as such you're supposed to be able to tolerate minor flaws
in spelling and still extract content.

---
Now, on the lighter side, an escapee article from net.jokes may indicate that
someday the  AI programs resident on the net may too learn to misspell:

  "That may be difficult to believe, but we are learning astonishing things
about computers every day.
  "With such machines, anything is possible, jealousy and even murder."

--Trang Shi Wu, in an article by Mickey McGuire entitled "Jealous Computer
Kills Top Scientist" in the 10 July 1984 issue of Weekly World News

---
L S Chabot

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