At 17:20 +0100 14/7/97, George Sachs wrote:
>Is it too much to ask of us Engineers, Researchers, Consultants, or other
>PROFESSIONALS, that when we forward messages to this list they are at least
>somewhat in keeping with grammatically correct English!
At 12:32 AM 7/15/97 +0100, Yakov Horenstein wrote:
>How brave you are! I have often felt like writing the exact same thing, but
>always chickened out. Frankly, I am astounded by the sloppiness and
>imprecision of a lot of the language used on Internet, not only on rp-ml.
While I can certainly agree that a poorly written message is distracting, I
would rather read a grammatically imperfect posting than no posting at all.
One of the purposes of this internet forum is to allow for the dissemination
of ideas through an international community. If the members of this
community become overly concerned with the creation of grammatically perfect
messages, it is likely that some ideas will die on the keyboard. Any reader
of this list knows that the group of regular contributors comprises a small
percentage of the list membership, and it is perhaps concern over this type
of commentary that more people do not offer their opinions. I would
suggest, therefore, that rather than commenting on these grammatical
failings publicly, which serves only to humiliate the individual in front of
his or her peers, those who have a problem with this issue should vent
privately about it. Whether the result of a fundamental shortcoming in
education or from hastiness, clumsy writing is unfortunate, but it is the
content of the posting not the quality that is important even if it means
that the reader must extract the idea being conveyed from a poorly written
message.
Richard Corden
Richard Corden
corden@globaltool.com
Global Tool and Engineering, Inc.
131 Commercial Parkway #1C, Branford CT 06405
Voice: (203) 488-3288
Fax: (203) 488-0812
http://www.globaltool.com
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