Another insightful post from Penelope Trunk:
We should judge people by their ideas, their creativity, their enthusiasm. None of this naturally comes at the heels of good grammar.A general rule I try to follow is to not spend more time producing a post than my collective readers will take consuming it. So if it takes me 30 minutes to write, it better take my 30 readers at least 1 minute to read, 1 loyal reader 30 minutes to read, or somewhere in between. That way the more popular a blog is, the more time a writer can justify spending on it.
Writing without typos is outdated. It’s impossible to proofread your own work, and it is not financially viable to produce typo-free copy—if it made financial sense, the newspaper industry would be booming. But instead, the riddled-with-typos blogging industry is booming.
I mean no offense :)
ReplyDeleteHa ha, it wasn't just you Kev. I just need to hire you.
ReplyDeleteHarrison, a post grew out of a comment I was writing to you about this. http://mattkiefer.wordpress.com/2009/05/24/a-post-that-started-as-a-comment/
ReplyDeleteI see what you're saying Matt. And I do spend a lot of time reading and rereading my content to ensure it is thoughtful and succinct. However, I think Penelope's main point was that online grammar Nazi's only stifle creative online content by encouraging people to spend more time then necessary on grammar rules. Structure is important, but there is definitely a trade off of the time we can spend on grammar and content.
ReplyDeleteIf Penelope Trunk doesn't think grammar is a big deal, why does she pay someone to proofread her posts?
ReplyDeleteNot only that, there is a lot more to the blog vs newspaper story than good grammar.
Snobbish people who correct others' grammar are annoying, but I do not agree that basic grammar is not important. Like it or not using basic grammar correctly is a sign of education and intelligence, and if you care about what you write I think you should care enough to use it. Trunk can whine all she wants to about people judging other people by their grammar but the fact is they do. Them's the breaks. And I don't think it's necessarily unwarranted. If a person doesn't care enough about what they're writing to use basic grammar correctly, why should I care about reading it?
You misspelled "they're" as "their" in your Blockbuster post.
ReplyDeleteYou owe me 5 bucks...
"If Penelope Trunk doesn't think grammar is a big deal, why does she pay someone to proofread her posts?"
ReplyDeleteHer point and my point was not that grammar has no importance, but that the goal shouldn't be perfect grammar (because there is a trade off of time spent on grammar and time spent on content).
"If a person doesn't care enough about what they're writing to use basic grammar correctly, why should I care about reading it?"
That is a good point though and why I will continue to strive to not have grammatical mistakes.
"You owe me 5 bucks..."
Sorry Anthony, my editor is an unpaid internship.