big bad bri wrote:beano & dandy,6 dc figurine collection and although i havent really bought an american comic in years i did buy the new number 1's of swamp thing,action comics,detective comics,justice league,JLI & animal man.
also was a bit peeved forbidden planet was selling the spider king of crooks for £3.99 and i paid full price when it came out and i still aint read it so should have waited
Should have waited.
You'e not the first forum member to write "would have" or "should have" and something just had to be said.
I used to work with a bloke who was always correcting my grammar so now its my turn tee hee.
Last edited by AndyB on 08 Sep 2011, 17:41, edited 1 time in total.
Reason:Split topic - putting in what he was talking about
stevezodiac wrote:Should have waited.
You're not the first forum member to write "would have" or "should have" and something just had to be said.
The thing that I find most irritating is the constant and persistent use of lower case letters when a capital is demanded. Is it because people are always texting, is it due to a lack of knowledge, are they just lazy or do they simply not care? Anyone fancy running a course on the function of the shift key?
I admit i am 2 lazy 2 use the shift key as i do quite a bit of typing on other forums as well this is the 1st time anyone has complained about it. as we are now a generation of texters & it doesnt really seem that important,and even i get annoyed when i get texts mostly in text speak as i aint got a clue what half the words are but maybe because im geting old
big bad bri wrote:I admit i am 2 lazy 2 use the shift key as i do quite a bit of typing on other forums as well this is the 1st time anyone has complained about it. as we are now a generation of texters & it doesnt really seem that important,and even i get annoyed when i get texts mostly in text speak as i aint got a clue what half the words are
We seem to be approaching Swirly's Poe's Law territory here, Bri, at least in the sense that it is difficult to tell whether you are attempting parody or merely exasperated. You are certainly making many apparently deliberate mistakes, so I suspect the former, especially as you produce a specious argument in your first sentence and no discernible argument at all in your second, a type of delivery that has its roots in the stream of consciousness technique in James Joyce's Ulysses. Well done, a good effort.
I remember someone recently saying they were aware of their typing errors but could not be bothered to go back and correct them but that is different from incorrect use of the language. My post was meant in semi jest.
big bad bri wrote:I admit i am 2 lazy 2 use the shift key as i do quite a bit of typing on other forums as well this is the 1st time anyone has complained about it. as we are now a generation of texters & it doesnt really seem that important (
It's very important because it makes posts a really unpleasant struggle and chore to read. Most people make the effort to express themselves well. (Obviously, if people genuinely struggle with writing it's a completely different matter, but we're apparently talking about mere laziness here ...?)
For people looking in, it also reinforces the predjudice the world has that people who read comics are in some way subliterate, unable to master even basic elementary level punctuation. We should be thinking about how we present the image of comic fans to the world.
Steve, I'm quite glad your grammar police alter ego showed up for "should have." Saying "I should have done it" as is daft as saying "I of bought a load of comics today." "Of" and "have" aren't interchangeable!
This was too far off-topic, so I split it off and moved it to Non-comics discussion!
What I said the other day on the Belfast Telegraph website was that while the substance of what someone is saying is far more important than the detail of grammar and spelling, it's gone far too far.
Poor grammar, including nonsense such as "could have", "would have" and "should have" (a mishearing of "could've", "would've" and "should've") plus lack of sentence structure can result in the substance of what someone is saying being lost because the way they have written it is so much of a distraction.
Comprehensibility does require an effort on the part of the writer to both ensure that what they write makes sense in absolute terms and that the way it is written does not distract from that.
We need to make allowances for dyslexics (and I would remind everybody that we have at least one dyslexic that I personally know of on this forum, and therefore almost certainly quite a few more that I don't know of), and we all make mistakes, to the extent that I would hate to put my posts through a UK English grammar checker, but there is no excuse for those who are capable but do not at least try.
Well said, Andy. I must admit that until this last week or so I thought I was ploughing a lone furrow on this matter, and trying not to upset people at the same time. I have sometimes failed abysmally in the latter, of course. I think people are just too eager to send their thoughts winging through the ether to pause long enough to reflect on what they have written. My advice is to use the Preview button, and keep using it until you can find no faults in your grammar, your spelling, and the expression of your thoughts and ideas. As Buddy Holly famously once sang, Take Your Time.
To be honest, I keep my mouth shut a lot, but while I tolerate the likes of "should have" with reasonably bad grace, I will not tolerate the caps lock being switched on and kept on (known as yelling in online circles.) While we are all used to speech balloons being written in all caps, there was white space to compensate, including kerning and tracking (the space between the characters) being wider than you would get on a computer screen.
I can accept big bad bri writing in all lower case, as it's rather easier to read than all caps, and it isn't in txtspk. However, proper use of capitals does improve readability - the changes of character heights helps you see the letters more clearly.
I was always top of the class for English [despite being a Scot] and I'm relatively articulate.
However, I write posts quickly to retain spontanaiety, and I am well aware I put in loads of spelling mistakes [see WORD 8, above] however, I often appreciate a post if it is written with passion first and foremost: I will take this over a post that has been over-analyzed grammatically and puts perfect diction before an interesting 'read'.
Immaculate spelling looks much more presentable, but I write these posts very quickly ,I'm afraid.
Ironically reading comics as a child made me the best in class at spelling. I fear I may have made some members paranoid about their posts. One of my favourite examples of grammar correction was in Inspector Morse:
Lewis: "Death was instant, Sir."
Morse: "Instantaneous, Lewis. Coffee is instant, death is instantaneous."
OK, I'll bite now. I appreciate that many people do not have the same skill set as myself or may have a better one than I when it comes to dealing with English and eloquence.
But I appreciate a passionate post that is informative and amusing than one that is precise and ponderous. Which is why I will let spelling mistakes pass as typing is still a skill that many of us have learned the hard way. I can get up to about 40 plus words a minute, but I still carry out the old 'hunt and peck' method of typing at times, so I am aware that typing can be hard work for many of us. But if a post is egocentric, self-opinionated and abusive then I will pick at every single error I can find. If that includes their grammar, their use of vocabulary and their spelling so much the better. *VEG*
I prefer correct usage and not da txtspk so keep the former and try and avoid the latter.
I started to say something sensible but my parents took over my brain!
We recently had a bit of an uproar on the forum about people picking on others, and now we have a moderator supporting members picking on others, and turning a throwaway comment that would have been forgotten had it been left in its original context, into a whole thread, with certain people piling in and giving vent to their prejudices.
