But I Can Write Any Way I Want!
There's a comment that gets me every time on discussion lists. Oh, I rarely say anything unless I can clearly point out a specific problem, but ... well, here it is.
"It's my poetic license to spell and punctuate however I want."
This one gets me every time. Only, of course, given the topic of the rant, it's not usually written like that.
Why do I have a problem with that? Well, there are aesthetic reasons, and practical reasons. Let me address the practical ones first.
First: Punctuation, isn't it, well.... fun???!!!!
Punctuating solely with elipses (....) or other marks (I've seen someone who only uses ~tildes~) or whatever else does cause some people significant problems.
I have a couple of friends with mild to moderate dyslexia. They have enough trouble working in a text-based medium already, and I don't see any point in making it harder for them.
The other problem (and a bit more serious) are for people who use text-to-speech readers, due to vision problems. The text-to-speech reader can understand normal punctuation, but it doesn't know how to read things like lots of ellipses (instead of commas or periods) or tildes as punctuation. This means that that kind of punctuation is far less understandable.
Finally, an overuse of inappropriate levels of punctuation (????!!!!!!, and so on) general just shows that y ou didn't convey your intent in what you said already. There are plenty of ways to do this which are a lot clearer. Maybe something like...
*excited bouncing* My long distance partner's coming in on a plane tonight. Yay!
or
*puzzled look* I'm really not sure what you said by the line above. Can you try explaining it again?
Both of these are a good bit more clear. And, before anyone asks, it's my understanding that the use of * or _ or <> or whatever isn't a great thing for the text-to-speech readers, but that it's bearable to deal with used appropriately and cautiously.
Second: the IsSUe of caPitaLiSatIOn
First, there's the issue of *all* capitals. Please don't do this. It's considered to be shouting, and it's a real pain in the eye to read for any length of time. There are other ways to indicate emphasis, such as * or _ marks setting off text, or simply employing good writing skills.
I do know of a couple of posters who don't capitalise at all. With them, this is a deliberate choice, but they also go to effort to make sure that their posts are otherwise formatted in a way that aids comprehension. (One poster indents all comments on both sides, so there's plenty of whitespace. and moderate length paragraphs. Another uses short paragraphs almost all the time.)
Finally, on some BDSM discussions or with people familiar with said discussions, you'll sometimes see things like "My Master says that i should not worry about these things, and that W/we will be fine, no matter what Y/you all say."
Leaving aside the connotations of the sentence entirely (that's just a sample to demonstrate...) you can see that this, again, will cause problems for text-to-speech readers, and for anyone with trouble processing text. It's also just annoying and tedious to read for many people.
The final issue with this is a consent issue - the capitals and lower case uses are meant, in this case, to indicate dominant or submissive status. When you're writing to a whole large group of people, many of whom you don't know and have never heard from, it's pretty rude to tell them how they should relate to you on what is, fundamentally, an intimate level.
Third: The Unending Paragraph (No, I'm not demonstrating this one.)
This is probably the most annoying one - people who post 20 or 30 lines or more without any breaks. *Please* don't do this - it's incredibly difficult to read, takes more effort to respond to, and will probably make most people with any level of dyslexia or just a headache avoid your posts entirely.
I admit that conciseness is not a virtue of mine (I'm working on it, though) but a good guideline is for each paragraph to be 4 to 7 lines long, preferably with some variety in length of blocks of text. This helps the reader focus on the concepts, reply to pertinent points, and put emphasis on the right concepts. A single line by itself stands out nicely from the rest of the message, and makes a more emphatic point.
This is probably the single most important thing to do to make your writing readable to everyone.
Fourth: What sort of imprasion r u makin?
I know that there are all sorts of reasons for poor spelling. However, there's a diffference, to my way of thinking, between the occaisional typo or misspelling and needless abbreviation and laziness.
My guidelines: If you know you have trouble spelling well, several email programs now come with a spellcheck built in. Running this should *help*, and doesn't take very long. If your email program of choice doesn't have a spellcheck program, you probably have a word processing program on your computer that does.
This won't catch everything (particularly not grammatical uses or homonyms) but it's a start. Proofreading your work often helps with grammatical structure, as does reading it outloud, if you're not sure about the way the sentences are put together. Generally your ear is more attuned to 'natural' speech than your eye is, so when you read it out loud, it's easier to pick out the places where things don't make sense.
As well, don't use needless abbreviations like r for 'are' and 4 for 'for' or so on. These are just tedious and frustrating to read. They might be more useful in chat, where you're trying to talk quickly, but they're hard to deal with in email, and there's no compelling reason to use them.
In a medium where the only thing that other people may know about you is how you write (they've probably not met you in person, or talked to you on the phone), how you write is what gives people information about you. If you write in a sloppy or lazy way, or in a way that makes it unnecessarily hard for people to read what you write, you're essentially saying "I don't care enough about talking to you to make it reasonably easy to understand what I'm saying - my 'freedom to do what I want' is more important than expressing myself in a way you're likely to understand easily."
I don't know about the rest of you out there, but if someone doesn't want to meet me half way, I've got better things to do with my time, generally, than to try and play mindreader and guess what they want to talk about. If it's a group I'm highly invested in maintaining, I'll usually offer a request that someone make things more readable along with advice on what would help, but if people persist in not doing those things, or worse, get an Attitude about it, then I won't bother reading or replying to their stuff.
No, one person doing this doesn't make a large dent, but on most of the groups I hang out on, it's not just one person who feels that way, but many of the people who are active correspondants on the group. If you alienate most of the responders on a group by not making yourself easy to understand, you may find it harder to be a part of discussions.
Now, the aesthetic issues:
Is how you're typing really all that unique?
This is probably my biggest aesthetic complaint. Honestly. You're not doing anything new and original. *Every* time in the last three years I've seen someone complain that they are writing in a unique and creative way, it's been a way I've already seen done, and done poorly. I think uniqueness is a bad claim.
Poetic license is also a poor claim, in my eyes. Poetry has to do with the skilled use of words to create an impression. What poor punctuation and spelling and "I'm an artistic free spirit who can write however I want" tells me is that you don't care about the content of what you want to talk about, just about how you present it. That brings me to the final point,
so ...
Form versus content:
I read mailing lists and online groups for content. If I wanted poetry, I'd go pick up a poetry book, or look at sites particularly aimed at poetry. When I'm communicating on an email list that *isn't* about poetry, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the content should be presented in a way that makes it easy to continue a conversation.
Summary:
All of this is to say, essentially, 'When you're communicating in a pure text environment, don't try to do cute things that simply make it harder for people to read what you're writing.'
Personally, I'd rather make sure that what I write is reasonably comprehensible to the largest possible audience. To me, that means using reasonably standard English, and reasonably standard punctuation. This also means not using technology (such as HTML in emails) which not all email readers can process usefully (and which, again, really make it hard for people using text-to-speech or other visual aids to read)
I hope this rant is both informative and useful.
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Last updated: August 1, 2001
gleewood@gleewood.org