An opinion piece I read once about accessibility in writing—touching on things like tone indicators and breaking up overly-dense sentences/paragraphs—made a point that stuck with me and has clear applications in so many areas:
Your audience only has so much cognitive energy to devote to what you’re saying. Every little hurdle you add funnels that much more energy away from understanding your message toward deciphering what you were trying to say.
That means unnecesary jargon, overlong sentences with complex structures, and pretentious diction are all hindering your ability to communicate. But so are grammatical mistakes and typos.
Sure a few heer and there are forgivable, but fi ur reeders hev 2 desifer sumthen liek dis jus bc day shud no wut u mean, they may lose interest or be too distracted by the medium to comprehend the message.
Corollary to all this: those cute little “quirks” you give your writing so people will recognize you by your style are ironically hindering their ability to recognize you by your ideas, which are infinitely more important than an aesthetic
Not like “Of course, in theory dumb people exist”. Actually, practically, there will be people in this thread who can’t conjugate verbs or spell and it’s not because they speak a different language, not because auto correct isnt working, and not anything else. It’s from being lower on the bell curve.
“Oh but dream_weasel! Some people are just differently-abled!”. Yeah… And some aren’t.
We should continue to gently correct spelling and grammar mistakes online.
An opinion piece I read once about accessibility in writing—touching on things like tone indicators and breaking up overly-dense sentences/paragraphs—made a point that stuck with me and has clear applications in so many areas:
Your audience only has so much cognitive energy to devote to what you’re saying. Every little hurdle you add funnels that much more energy away from understanding your message toward deciphering what you were trying to say.
That means unnecesary jargon, overlong sentences with complex structures, and pretentious diction are all hindering your ability to communicate. But so are grammatical mistakes and typos.
Sure a few heer and there are forgivable, but fi ur reeders hev 2 desifer sumthen liek dis jus bc day shud no wut u mean, they may lose interest or be too distracted by the medium to comprehend the message.
Corollary to all this: those cute little “quirks” you give your writing so people will recognize you by your style are ironically hindering their ability to recognize you by your ideas, which are infinitely more important than an aesthetic
FTFY :)
Following on: Dumb people exist.
Not like “Of course, in theory dumb people exist”. Actually, practically, there will be people in this thread who can’t conjugate verbs or spell and it’s not because they speak a different language, not because auto correct isnt working, and not anything else. It’s from being lower on the bell curve.
“Oh but dream_weasel! Some people are just differently-abled!”. Yeah… And some aren’t.
Language evolves. I say let it, as long as it isn’t ambiguous.
*grammer
No.
*Ne