jwp (11/09/82)
For those who may be somewhat interested in the current discussion of spelling and grammar in net.flame but who do not want to waste their time reading all of the articles, I have compiled the following statistics. The number in parentheses indicates the number of submissions on this subject. For Correct Spelling/Grammar Against Correct Spelling/Grammar yale-com!wagar (1) alice!sjb (1) 5941ux!klc (1) ihuxt!iasia (5) ihuxe!aark (1) ihuxt!dwv (2) ihuxu!klick (1) ll1!jmr1 (3) inuxd!stevens (2) ihuxo!morris (1) mcnc!cjp (2) grkermit!markm (1) whuxlb!npl (2) cbosg!djb (2) tekid!garey (1) ihuxr!lew (1) uiucdcs!mcdaniel (1) sdchema!jwp (1) Totals: For: 11 people (13 articles) Against: 7 people (14 articles) This includes all articles received between 0800 31Oct82 and 0200 09Nov82. There were several articles left unclassified due to their pacifistic nature (I did not, however, note any obvious spelling or grammatical errors in those submissions except for one clearly used intentionally for its effect). ihuxu!klick wins the award for presenting what I feel to be the most compelling *practical* argument for correctness. The most surprising arguments were presented by two of the people against correct spelling and grammar. They implied that they actually do care about such things when writing important paper memos but that their communications to us on the net are so insignificant that they do not warrant such attention. John Pierce, Chemistry, UC San Diego ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdchema!jwp