itsinyerblood
Well-Known Member
Have a like for some quality punctuation - not many posters on here would have remembered the apostrophe in 'keeper three times.
Thanks for the like.....honestly didn't think anyone noticed or cared. In the past there have been a few threads exactly about this topic. Sometimes the accusation that's been thrown at posters who care about punctuation and grammar has been that of 'grammar nazi', and generally it's happened because there's been a constant flow of 'there' where 'their' was correct. Personally I enjoy grammar and punctuation, if only because it helps me, as a reader, to navigate through posts that are sometimes a little dense.
What I don't do though is stand in any type of judgement concerning the absence of good grammar and punctuation. Not everyone paid attention at school or, come to that, could find any enthusiasm for those topics that would help later in life. I happened to be one of those hapless youngsters who couldn't stand Arithmetic/maths, so it was only because I was drawn into betting shops in my late teens that my interest in numbers didn't sink through the floorboards. Words were a different matter altogether, not only did I love language, I saw the importance of how to break language down so that it made sense. To me there was nothing worse than what you might call a 'block sentence or paragraph' that couldn't be improved by simple, yet intelligent, punctuation.
These days, what I think matters more than anything is the quality of content in a message. I can cut the poster some slack if punctuation's not a strong area for them, as long as the meaning they're trying to convey is comprehensible to me, then give me passion or strength of feeling any day......oh, and before I sign off, I find that with the advent of my mature years I'm making more and more mistakes when it comes to writing. It's not deliberate, but I'm finding that I sometimes miss a word, or that I've misspelt something, so, as vital as language is, I think those of us who have a tendency to readily correct posters who don't share the same attention to detail should step back and judge a poster's words by the content of their posts, rather than lecturing someone in an unhelpful manner.