A wish for the New Year!

[Wheezycat]

Please, oh, please, can I ask for people to use full stops and commas when they post. It is so hard to read some of the posts otherwise, and there are times when I just give up. So, please, write your posts in sentences! You may get more responses that way!

[Minushabens]

Haha - agreed!

Having had to study grammar recently, ( <-fronted adverbial - needs a comma as per changed rule since muggins learnt to write in the 1970s) I realise every day that it's complicated. However, (another one there) if I don't get the gist of what someone is asking within a reasonable time of reading it, I do just click off rather than try to fathom it.

A good tip is to use Grammarly as an add-on; it works well for me in Firefox & will pick up UK-English spelling & grammar errors with probably 90-95% accuracy, and teach you at the same time.

[hypercat54]

Hi I agree. I give up with posts that are hard to read. I would also add how about paragraphs too please. x

[M-D-F]

Most certainly agreed, I also tend to give up.

[hypercat54 in reply to M-D-F]

The other thing I hate is swearing in posts/replies. If there are even the s or p words I don't bother reading any further and certainly don't answer. I wish people would read the rules about this specially before they join in.

Oh and replying to under 16's as well! x

[Hidden]

It would be unfair though to exclude those who's grammar is not as good as our own!

[Wheezycat in reply to Hidden]

What I am looking for is some kind of indicated pauses between different thoughts. That is, really, what full stops, commas and paragraphs are, but even if there is just a longer gap it would help. I don’t want to exclude, but I do want to be able to read all posts.

[ElizabethC in reply to Hidden]

The original poster never said anything about excluding anyone. They have reminded people to use commas and full stops. This helps to ensure that readers can understand what is being said.

It is incredibly difficult to read a load of prose where there are no sentences or paragraphs. It could cause incorrect understanding of the issue which could also lead to incorrect advise.

[Minushabens]

Slipping into grumpy, old git mode whilst carefully separating my adjectives and clauses, I think a lot of this boils down to the way anyone born more than a day after than me - they who define the essence of young striplings, never having been further than their dad's garage & being too young to have ever known what the real world was like - learn to write these days.

There is a debate in schools about if it's even worth teaching kids to write anymore. Youngsters live in a world where you don't communicate in words as much as in abbreviations & emojis.

The classroom of the future might well look like:

Teacher (texting to personal screens of class): Hi. Open yr copy of yr bk. Dickens called this A Tale of Two Cities. Plz cn u go thru it & remove waffle. Itz 500 pages long & we cant fit it on a txt msg.

Kids stare in stunned silence at a 120-word opening sentence.

"Bt sr, thrz wrds evrywr.

The teacher hurls the eraser emoji to their e-mail, reminding them of the history lesson when old Minushabens told them about how a blackboard rubber cracked him on the head from 20-feet away because he put a giant rubber fly on Diane Wood's shoulder for being the class swat & she screamed so loud that nowadays a 20-member armed response unit would have racked up outside.

Teacher: "Watch me - 'woz gud n bad thn' & adds a smiley & sad face. Poor Dickens. Imagine having to use a pen to write all that. Easy - get on with it".