Is it just me? Are the writing skills declining even more on BITOG? Not that we ever had lofty standards, but recently it's gone in the dumpster. Now, I know I'm no mori. (caught him on that one the other day) I type like a madman and do some whoppers myself. Short edit time kills me, too.

Please don't ask me to skim the examples.....well ok..."recoment me a oil". Another guy writes how he was educated in England and is pretty sharp....first sentence he interjected the ever present unneeded apostrophe after a pluralizing "s". Liked the "grilfriend" (thread soon deleted). I'm not naming names, but some/most of the fellows are born English speakers.....and some of the "furren borne" do just fine!

Rant off - not trying to be a highbrow, but good G0D men, have some decency. Don't you interact at work? Your own business? It does leave a mark.

"blaming school, and what it did or didn't teach you is a poor excuse for being uninformed or ignorant.
Anyone with a brain and some curiosity can learn a lot about practically anything they want to." MarkC

One of the few times we're in total agreement. What I learned in school had very little to do with what a very good group of teachers attempted to teach me. After rebellion (and staying drunk) at school, much of what I have learned has been from high volume of reading since school. Fiction,technical,news,outdoor magazines. Would read more now if not addicted to bitog.

Bob

Pasted from "Is this girl really this stupid" thread .

Bob
_________________________

Quite honestly I think the quality of this site has drastically declined....

I don't disagree with this and don't 100% blame schools....however, some foundation needs to start early. Some basic skills need to be installed. I guess it's never too late!!

I don't think it has any more to do with anything other than random mis-connections between brain and keys. How many times have I typed thing instead of think ..where one letter alters it? Is and it ..etc..etc. There's also phonics of economy getting in there too. I think that our brains grab the first "there" that's in some random stack when we're expressing ourselves in a para-conversational manner.

I'm not high on the sensible communication scale ..but I don't see too much of it having origin in "ignorance". Text based communication, as a primary two-way modality, is not much more than a decade old ..but many of us never took typing nor focused our interests on written communication. Many who engaged in such things had an administrative assistant to fix their glitches or had good cause to proof read their works.

I'll admit that I've been noticing trouble with otherwise simple words of late. I read mostly technical writings and do like research for insight and hopeful answers as to "why." At work, there's little documentation, and often times there's auto correction with word processors.

How much is due to the effects of my medications remains unknown. I do know that my memory is not what it use to be, and I'm only 30yrs young.

???

a lot of people myself included just don't care enough to bother with hassle of proper english text on some obscure website where nobody knows you're real name. i use an automatic spell checker and you all should consider you're selves lucky i do that.

mori for some reason has a fixation with my "youre and you're". hey if its such a bother then come over and fix my spell checker. it inserts an apostrophe where is is not needed sometimes. i'm not going to worry about it. why should you guys? i am not here to impress anyone. i am not here to sell anything. so quite frankly i don't care if someone thinks my grammar is good bad or ugly. it just doesn't matter to me.

and there is a difference between grammar and spelling. i am an excellent speller, and i have been known to type with proper grammar, but i guess i don't value anyone here's opinion enough to fix it. my spell checker is screaming at me to fix the errors in this post. i fixed about 70% of them. eh that is good enough to get my point across. add that to the fact that i have dyslexia and am physically incapable of typing out certain words, and hey we have an interesting mix of people lighting themselves on fire.

me like good soup. hot.

There is no excuse for having poor command of the English language. Typos are one thing, not using something like your and you're, their and there, etc., properly is absolutely ridiculous. It is third grade level stuff at best, things that should be second nature, and of which people dont have a clue?

Mistaking punctuation is another one. A misuse of a comma, semicolon, etc. is understandable. Sometimes the uses of these items is not clear. However, we are not citing literature here. We are not producing bibliographies. We are writing relatively simple sentences, of which the punctuation generally is, simple. So it does not make sense to me that people cannot punctuate their writing properly.

And finally, when somebody posts asking a question in one or two lines, not enough background information, poor spelling, grammar, etc., why should anyone take that person seriously? Unfortunately at that point, when this person responds in other threads, they will likely not use proper language there either, and thus not be taken seriously anyplace on the forum. This leads to friction and folks being bothered with others.

The uneducated have no excuse to being so. They had access to this sort of information, and (theoretically) have been using it since the third grade, or so.

JMH

This is the exact reason you should try! Don't take this the wrong way, and since you said you don't care and don’t try, Master ACiD I'm going to be a bit explicit. I don’t know you. You could be a stinking genius. When I see your posts, I picture an idiot – now if you have a mental disability, then OK I guess, but again you say you don’t care/try. (Which is it?) I really don’t read your posts all the way through, sometimes they give me a headache. JohnBrowning's are the same way. You don’t care if people read your stuff? Then - why post?

I remember one time you emailed me, and were amazed I didn’t know you are “Master ACiD”. Honestly I know only a very few real names. So I guess I’m the idiot!!
:chucklehead:

If people have absolutely no pride in authorship, what can one do?

I don't wish to post just to correct other's errors. I think that smells of pretensions.

I am quite miffed at "better then" being typed as opposed to "better than".

I would never point this out to any individual poster.

View another forum like say.... a "Video Gaming" or "Import Tuner" forum... and then see how your views on bad grammar at this site change.

meh c@r iz supa tite u losaz jes dont no i hav it on teh gran turismo its 1337 u r3t@rdz

I'm just upchucking my views....venting some steam. I don't think I would pick out individual posts and right in middle of the topic point out a grammatical error. Especially a typo!

Since I think it's rather appropriate language for an oil forum, I'm going to quote my earlier response to another poster who wondered why we care so much about "grammer" [sic] in this forum:

Because it's part of proper human communication.

English may have weird spelling and lots of exceptions to its rules, but we accept that as a tradeoff for the turbocharged power this language gives us . . . when we use it properly.

Change your verb tenses as appropriate, keep the subject-verb agreement topped off, properly inflate the spelling, and English'll serve you for a lot of years.

That is all.

I agree with those who've said this place is far better than some others with respect to the quality of writing.

Oilbabe works in education, school social worker.

The truth is that it's amazing any children get a decent education. Some of the crud that kids grow up around makes it nearly impossible for the children to learn.

There are both good and bad teachers. Most of the teachers I know really care about kids learning.

The biggest part of the problem is not bad teachers. The biggest contributor is bad parents. Parents who don't give a rip about their kids, can't or won't help them with their homework, or parents that just don't value education contribute to kids doing poorly in school.

I've seen parents with their grade school children, on a school night, shopping at 11pm or later in Wally World. How is that helping their kids.

Don't tell me they can't afford a sitter. That's merely an excuse. Can't they work with their neighbor on that problem?

For example, "you watch my kids tomorrow night and go shopping tonight, I'll watch yours tonight and go shopping tomorrow night."

We get what we expect. If parents don't expect their children to do well, then they will get children who just get by or worse in school. Then the cycle continues, these folks have kids, and more kids, and the gap between the haves and have-nots widens because there are more have-nots competing for low skill jobs, keeping wages down, why skilled jobs, requiring an education see increased wages as the pool of qualified candidates shrinks.

If you find any spelling or grammar errors in this post, feel free to keep them.

Pretty strong words. Just because of his (written) grammar, and in spite of his content and function? Wow.

I think I already scrawled out a (perfect) rant on this topic some time ago (in this forum). I believe it was to JohnBrowning actually...