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Is Typing Ruining Your Ability To Spell?
NSN A392-99-964-5927 writes "My handwriting abilities have deteriorated over the years. Putting a real pen to paper, I get frustrated over how to spell correctly, as I am so accustomed to using a keyboard and knowing where the letters are. Having spoken to a few friends, I've found that this has become apparent to them, too. I've noticed that my grammar is also affected; maybe this is because I spent too much time on IRC and lowered my standards. Hand-written words are now becoming obsolete. There is often no need to think about writing anymore, or about how something is spelled. Are other Slashdotters having the same problem? (I'm used to Telex machines, which should give you an indication of how old I am.)"
Thank god for spill check.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That's why I've always maintained correct/proper capitalization and grammar and compete sentences, even in IMs and IRC chats. In fact, it actually slows me down when I have to purposely corrupt a text message in order to reduce its size (such as on Twitter or SMS).
Harold
My IM client (pidgin) underlines misspelled words in red, as does firefox, so I've found that my spelling has actually been getting better. I tend to actually learn the correct spelling over time.
Your problem isn't that it's rote memorization -- I'm terrible at anything requiring rote memorization. Your problem (and a lot of other peoples') is you don't read enough books. I urge you and everyone else to acquaint yourselves with you local public library, or if you're in college, its library.
Readaholics never have trouble with spelling, unless all they read is the internet.
Free Martian Whores!
capitalization is especially important - consider the sentence:
i helped my uncle jack off a horse
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Abuse of parenthetical comments? Like having nested parenthetical comments that make reading the original difficult? I do that too.
The recommended solution is the use of footnotes[1], since somebody can jump down to them, read them, then jump back up and easily reread the whole sentence ignoring them[2].
[1] Like this.
[2] Further footnotes allow nesting without any difficulties[3] such as avoiding parentheses mismatch.
[3] That said, nested footnotes should be use sparingly[4], as with too many layers it can be hard to reverse back up the stack.
[4] And recursive footnotes should never be used[4].
[5] Unreferenced footnotes are also something to avoid.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
[4] And recursive footnotes should never be used[4].
At least it's a tail-recursive footnote[1], so a good brain will just infinite loop, rather than overflowing the stack.
[1] Unlike a non-tail-recursive footnote[1] would look like this one.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Unreferenced footnotes aren't the worst[6] thing you could do.
Typing is muscle memory just like playing music. Guitarists don't consciously think "E-G-A-E-G-B/A-E-G-E-E-G" any more than a typist thinks "s-m-o-k-e- -o-n- -t-h-e- -w-a-t-e-r". (Well, bassists might but we're known to be pretty dense.)
I actually had trouble typing the hyphenated parts as my hands initially would spell out the whole words.
Have you never had a case where your fingers know your password but you don't? Happens to me all the time.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.