Desultory Thoughts

A very funny article [slashdot.org] (non-intentional) was posted by CmdrTaco on Slashdot today. CmdrTaco is an editor and, according to the article, the owner of Slashdot. Slashdot.org, for the uninformed is “News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.” It has turned into a place for geeks to “discuss” articles that are submitted by the readers of Slashdot. It’s a community blog!The funny part about this post entitled “On the Subject of Slashdot Article Formatting” is that he addressed spelling and grammar and noted that they weren’t very important or that they were “secondary” issues. He proved it by misspelling several words including ‘to’ when he meant ‘too’. He even sited that as a direct example as one of the mistakes he doesn’t care about when he said, “Of course some users like to email me to tell me how much Slashdot sucks, how fat and lazy I am, and how the most terrible thing in the history of Slashdot is the fact that the 4th story down contains the word ‘to’ when it ought to contain the word ‘too’. That missing ‘o’ is the greatest travesty on-line today! It’s hard to take that seriously.” However, the Slashdot community disagrees, for the most part.

I’m using this article as an example of how important spelling and grammar are to the reader. When you misspell words, especially obvious ones like ‘to’ when you really mean ‘too’ and ‘there’ instead of ‘their’, it tells the reader that “you’re not as smart as you think I am”.

I hope that all the computer kids out there recognize that “See you later” is not really spelled “CUL8ER” and I wonder how much more of a problem this will be in the future, especially when the “editors” of a major blog don’t really care either. I know I’ll be certain that my children learn these essential basics.