xanthian@saturn.ADS.COM (Metafont Consultant Account) (01/09/90)
In article <50456@bbn.COM> rshapiro@BBN.COM (Richard Shapiro) writes: >In article <1990Jan5.055309.5776@eddie.mit.edu> thakur@eddie.MIT.EDU (Manavendra K. Thakur) writes: >>I have some problems with this charter. >> [improved charter suggested; I'm mostly happy with it] >> > >> -- Is the article well-written? Well-intentioned but poorly >> written articles tend to reflect thoughts and arguments >> that are best fuzzy or not well thought out. Nobody >> expects expect Pulitzer Prize-quality prose or poetic >> paragraphs. But if you can't be bothered to use >> good spelling, punctuation, and grammar, then you are >> calling into question just how much they really care about >> the arguments you are making. (This ties into the first >> criterion: one sign that an author is making a serious >> argument is that the author has taken the time to proofread >> the article before submitting it.) > > >I wouldn't get too carried away with this. Language skills are not the >strong point of the (mostly) technical community which dominates >Usenet. That's a fact of life we have to live with. I'm not sure >you'll get many submissions if the writers feel they're being judged >on this basis. > >My suggestion is that, unless the language is likely to lead to >confusion or misunderstanding, you should let it go. I'd love to see >an on-line version of 'Screen', but that's shooting a little too high >in the circumstances. People will want to use this group to learn, >which means that we'll make the mistakes that students typically make. >We should allow for this, I think. While Richard's demurrer has allowed moderating negatively for cases which might lead to "confusion or misunderstanding", I'd like to (modestly) support Manavendra's position on the issue of insisting on articles which show evidence of proofreading by the author. Aside from the obvious benefits of the author revising an article for clarity while reading it for typos, I think the author of an article meant for a group whose readership has chosen to vote for moderation of the group to eliminate dreck owes it to the group not to submit an article so rife with errors as to constitute the selfsame dreck. As a second argument, USENet has a large readership to whom English is a second language (or, in the nations with better educational systems, even a third or fourth). While I might be able eventually to puzzle out the meaning of an article with several misspellings per line, what would be the effect on a reader who hasn't the lifelong experience of guessing the meaning in such cases? I would prefer that the moderator ignore or fix him/herself three or four literacy errors in an article, but send worse cases back for rework. I would make exceptions for articles obviously written in an author's second language, or from an author (I read with delight articles from several such) handicapped by blindness or profound deafness, whose English skills are understandably less than perfect. Am I in a minority in finding error rife articles at least figuratively painful to read? -- Again, my opinions, not the account furnishers'. xanthian@well.sf.ca.us xanthian@ads.com (Kent Paul Dolan) Kent, the (bionic) man from xanth, now available as a build-a-xanthian kit at better toy stores near you. Warning - some parts are fragile.