This guy has come up with a unique way to keep Idiots off of the internet.
http://www.happyplace.com/9574/grammar-test-keeps-idiots-off...
Melanie Dian
BigCloset TopShelf
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Comments
It might work.
A Nice ride around Manchester to finish off the Sparkle weekend.
But I find that the spell-checker and grammar correctors supplied by Microsoft are just about the worst (and funniest)source of mistakes and blunders to be found on the internet, and that is after making due allowances for transatlantic differences.
I sometimes wonder if Microsoft is using cheap, immigrant, hispanic labour to compile the spell-checker programme.
If one uses archaic English that is perfectly correct for speech in historical settings then the spell-checker goes AWOL.
However, I can hardly see Microsoft being 'banned from the internet; something about 'being too big to be allowed to fail'.
Ah well, onwards and upwards.
Bev.
I remember when the grammar
I remember when the grammar checker for M$ used to be a small third party company located in southern Colorado. Gramtica or something like that. Then it became sorta popular (actually I don't remember how popular it became.) and was bought out by them, and taken in house.
Being there is limited competition, Corel's Word perfect, and Open Sources Open Office leap to mind, I wonder which ones you view as superior?
Mark
For the grammar and spelling...
I've never used a word processor that didn't go nuts on me when I knew what I was typing was correct. I've gotten to the point that I casually glance at the marked things, and if *I* notice anything, then I correct it. Otherwise, I just ignore it.
For the real features of the software, I find Open Office most intuitive. MS Office likes to bury things under 50 layers of clicking. Word Perfect is alright, but it requires too much work to learn. Kinda like a coupla text editors I can think of in the *nix world.
I can do literally everything I need without ever taking my hands off my keyboard when writing in OOo. When writing in MS Office, my hands have to drift over to the mouse to do pretty much anything other than simple formatting. If I want to make a table, split the page into columns, insert a manual break... all these things I can do from my keyboard in OOo, but need to use my mouse in MS Office.
Abigail Drew.
Keeping idiots off of the internet
Thanks for the chuckle.
May Your Light Forever Shine
May Your Light Forever Shine
I find ...
... the 'then'/'than' confusion a peculiarly US phenomenon. I'd never come across it until I did some proof reading for US writers. I wonder if it's to do with US pronunciation of the words? Certainly in my UK dialect 'a's and 'e's are pronounced completely differently and, incidentally differently from southern English speakers eg I say grass rather than grahss (the so-called short 'a' for me)
Robi
most problems
I think most problems come from pronunciation. Then and than sound exactly the same to me, and it did when I grew up and no one ever did bother to tell me the difference until the grammar-police on BC and Fictionmania. The same things go for me using would of instead of would've. To me, I grew up thinking people were saying would of, so when I am typing off the cuff, that's what comes out. Anyone, language is an evolving entity, let's go with the flow. Or dost thou thinkest we should remaineth in the dark ages? (I had a period there originally, but I know someone would've gotten pissy)
K.T. Leone
My fiction feels more real than reality
Katie Leone (Katie-Leone.com)
Writing is what you do when you put pen to paper, being an author is what you do when you bring words to life
Pronunciation can make
Pronunciation can make things interesting. I don't know about how English speakers in other counties might pronounce the following but, to me, three of the words can sound exactly the same... 'Over there, they're their own worst enemy'.
International English
Elsewhere in the world there are large international companies who hire people of all nationalities. I know of one in a country where the native language in not English yet the "company language" spoken is English. This appears to be a common practice. What has evolved is a different form of English that is based on common sense rules that would be applied to other languages for pronunciation and some grammar common to other languages. While they may speak English among themselves and understand each other I found after a week I understood less than 20% of what was being said -in English.
I would not be surprised to see new version of English evolve at least in Europe some time in the future.
Grammar ...
... is important if you wish to make what you write equate to what you mean. Poor spelling and grammar certainly interferes with my enjoyment of a story because it draws me away from the plot. If it's particularly bad then I give up reading. Certainly language changes and evolves with use and time but I don't see the point of replacing a perfectly good verb with a preposition (ie 'have' with 'of'). I may be a mere engineer (retd.) but I find the structure of language (English) is fascinating.
Accurate grammar certainly apples to writing software. Get the grammar wrong and all hell breaks loose. The 'IF THEN ELSE' construct doesn't work if you try to use 'IF THAN ELSE@ :) And leaving out the odd # when writing assembler can be a devil to debug ;)
One of my big gripes is the loss of the word 'disinterested' which doesn't mean 'uninterested'. Quite the reverse. In fact a truly disinterested comment is often from one who is deeply interested in the topic but detached from it personally. However, I think that's a lost cause.
Robi
Hooray for Big Brother
There are times when I am annoyed by some of the trash tossed about on the internet. This is especially true with some comments posted in response to serious political commentary and opinions on news sites.
Having said that, I find little humor in the solution to limiting access to the internet suggested in the piece. It reeks of elitist snobbery. Rather than being an open forum, a public common if you will, the person writing the piece would like to see the internet limited to only 'The best and the brightest,' people he views as good enough to share this realm with him.
Terms such as intellectual profiling, prejudice, bias, bigotry, intolerance, narrow-mindedness and intellectual Fascism come to my mind here. Who, may I ask decides who is good enough to be allowed access to the internet? Only those who were blessed with a first rate education? What if someone decided at some point access was still too open and decides only those with a classic education that included Latin be permitted access, going from questions addressing grammar to requiring people to answer questions posted in Latin? That solution to eliminating undesirables from mucking up our forum is just as valid.
For better or worse, the internet is what it is. Those who would like to see it limited are no better than the Communist Chinese who are doing their best to limit the exchange of free thought and ideas. Like Top Shelf / Big Closet, there are things posted on the internet that are not my cup of tea. Does that give me the right to demand stories including certain themes be blocked from being posted here? No. Like those who detest my writing, I simply ignore those stories I do no wish to read. Before everyone here signs up to follow Big Brother, I suggest you take a moment to consider where such a movement could lead.
Nancy Cole
P.S. For those who will chastise me for lacking a sense of humor, please stop and think. Though this might have been put forth as satire, I personally have little doubt there is somewhere in the author's mind a desire to actually do this. He did, after all, dedicate time and effort to come up with what he believes is a common sense solution.
"You may be what you resolve to be."
T.J. Jackson
Agreed
I'm with more Nancy than I am with Robbie on this. Poor grammar and spelling ('presentation') can spoil my enjoyment of a story, but usually the quality of the story-telling can carry me past that. The stories I do give up on are those where poor presentation conspires with plot and characterisation weaknesses to turn me off.
Those whose story-telling is good, but whose presentation is less so, need help, not ostracism; and that also applies to wider sphere of the whole internet. There I am less turned off by weak presentation than I am by stupidity and trolling; but I will still defend the right of those to be there. Even purveyors of outright untruths have to be allowed to have their say.
I am told that a specific aspect of the internet was arranged specifically to make censorship and blocking difficult. If that is true (and I do not know), I would like to shake the hands of those responsible for their foresight.
Xi
If the grammar + spelling of others is such an affront to them
They can stay off the web themselves, secure in their superiority and not having to rub shoulders with all us lowly lumpen hoi pallois. In fact, I don't even want snobs like that on MY internet! How about an ASSHOLE Captcha?!!
No wait, I'd probably fail that...
~hugs n' such, Veronica
.
.
(PERSON ON RAILING OF BRIDGE: I got nothin' to live for no more!
CONCERNED BYSTANDER: That should be 'I HAVE nothing to live for, ANY more'!
PERSON ON RAIL: Thank you, you made this so much easier...
BYSTANDER: That's 'you HAVE made this-' ..... Where'd she go?)
Well shit, I guess it really CAN happen here..,
.
Commenting on several comments here
The forced usage of selecting the proper homophone would certainly stop most robo-fill-in systems. And it might teach real people a bit, too.
As those whose stories I edit/proofread know, I try to jump on homophone errors, among others.
I will say, however, that I have seen the then/than error in a few stories from the east side of the pond between the US & Europe.
And I have also noticed that there is a difference in homophone errors depending on the accents of the writers, depending on where they are from.
Not to mention phrasing difference. I knew before moving 2/3 of the way across the US, that I was going to be hearing difference in the way English here is spoken, and more than the pronunciation, it is the phrasing that I notice, and not just because I now live in a predominantly black neighborhood. I'm not black, but the color of a person's skin makes no difference to me.
It’s not given to anyone to have no regrets; only to decide, through the choices we make, which regrets we’ll have,
David Weber – In Fury Born
Holly
It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.
Holly
Cupertinos
None of the cupertions listed ever bother me. Only two of the 'there' group are homophones in my idiolect too, but does that mistake really effect communication?
What does bother me a bit are the people who think that pointing out another's mistake makes them superior. And such post almost always wind up having more egregious errors in them than the thing they're peeving about (a tendency that, I think, even has a name, but I can't recall it.). I make tons of typing and other mistakes, but please address the real ones, not the made up ones.
The only people I think should be chased off of forums are the ignorant peeveologists who try to enforce all their zombie rules, Dryden's invention about prepositions for instance. But my favorites are the ones who tell me about the reproduction mechanisms of geese whenever I use the preterite of 'lie' in the sense of be recumbent. I know I've gripped about these idiots before, but it's happened to me several times, and I don't feel I need to abandon a perfectly good word because fools can't decline it; I mean, if you don't know what you're talking about STFU! FWIW, if we could change language with a vote, I'd vote with the ignorant peeveolgists and replace 'lay' as the preterite with something else, but it doesn't work that way, so I don't know how we're going to get this done; I blame all Anglo-Saxons.
Next time I'll whine about the passive voice attackers who can't find a passive in a barrel, and the two kinds of subjective jerks. /rant
No wait, forget that backslash. What kind of complete idiot makes a "grammar test" and only has items about typos?? Oh, yeah, and by the way these errors happen on all sides of all the ponds, or witness the total failure of BBC's recent 'Americanism' thread (even the ones selected as the best were wrong! And even The Economist was embarrassed.), so calm down, or someone will remind you of what Dr. Johnson said about R's.
Teasing...
'Affect' :-)
Well, excu-u-u-u-se me!
I remember when I posted my first story here after getting up the courage to finally do it. It was a mess. I had done all sorts of formatting in Word because I thought it was cool and would make my story look cool. Boy was I wrong. I didn't understand html at all. Not only that, in spite of wanting to make the story perfect grammarwise, I had made some awful errors, some through ignorance, and some through not being able to type. I am a terrible proofer of my own writing. Some kind readers pointed out some of my errors through comments and PMs. I asked for help - something that seems to beyond the concept of some that have commented before me in this series of comments. I have never taken a comment, PM or otherwise about one of my stories as an insult. Something that several of the previous commentors above have rather emphatically implied in their replies my PMs.
I thought that one of the purposes of this site was to help those who cared be better writers. From the comments I've received, some of the writers here don't think their poop smells. In spite of spinning wonderful tales, some of these authors' works are rife with grammatical, usage and spelling errors that distract (I wrote detract, but changed it) the readers from the story. Yes, there are differences in usage and spelling on either side of the pond, but that's not the problem. What some are talking about here is the 'dumbing down' of the language. English is probably the most complicated language out there. It has by far the largest vocabulary of any language. It has a wonderful heritage of Germanic and Romance languages, and has borrowed from many others. Yes the language is changing. Live languages always do change (unless you are French, or Slovenian). Missplacing 'of' for 'have' in speaking is seldom noticed, but when it is written in a narrative, not as a quote, it is WRONG; just as is the misuse use of 'lay' for 'lie' and vice versa. A news reporter in Little Rock was reporting on air about a woman who gave birth before she could get to the hospital. She said, "(She) lied on the floor and gave birth to her baby." That was awful. She corrected the narration before the next broadcast. I emailed her.
The media are worst offenders. Our schools are failing. I heard a teacher on Wheel of Fortune say, "Me and my best friend are ...." This was a school teacher who is trying to teach our youth how to speak and write. Folks we are in trouble.
Some of the authors here, Sue Brown and Louise Anne Smithson come to mind, write wonderful, lucid prose. One of the things that makes reading their stories so nice is that along with a great story line, one is not distracted (Or is that detracted? No, it's the former) by little errors in usage, etc. I think they do most of their own proofing - maybe not. The thing is, most of the authors here who do not think they need help proofing their works are the ones who need it the most. They are like house painters who fail to paint the trim. "Other than that, it's a pretty good job. What's your complaint?"
I have not had help proofing this message, and it probably shows. I will get help with my stories. Holly, get well soon!
Portia
Portia
'Off of the internet'
Well, that's him failed, then.
:-)