If You Habitually Have Typos In Your Work, Should People Listen To What You Have To Say?
I am by no means perfect. I make mistakes all the time. Spell check and auto-correct save me multiple times per day. But as I've been taking a look around steemit I have noticed that there are a lot of posts that get a decent amount of "steem" yet contain numerous and obvious typos. What does this say about these particular individuals?
Part of me thinks that being able to type every word correctly isn't a prerequisite to having valid and well researched opinions with strong factual support to lend credibility to an argument. But if a person isn't able to at least read through their post and correct the obvious errors then what's the likelihood that they're able to read through and comprehensively understand numerous sources, distinguish fact from fiction, and provide credible evidence to support their arguments?
While having a few typos in a post isn't a game changer, if you're misspelling words once or twice per paragraph then one can't help but wonder what kind of other things are being overlooked in your assessment of a particular subject. It promotes an uncertainty in your ability to professionally present your argument. While this isn't necessarily a professional setting, if you can't spell correctly then you are raising serious questions about your competency, which at the very least will not help validate an argument.
I'm wondering what other people think. How do numerous typos impact your opinion of a post? Feel free to weigh in!
(p.s. I hope I didn't misspell anything!)
Given that every high level executive I've ever gotten an email from seems barely capable of putting a sentence together, it's possible that more typos mean you're a better leader. ;)
Seriously though I think it depends. I've seen things that were relatively well worded, but, for instance, 'I' wasn't capitalized at all. Sometimes the grammar makes it pretty clear it's a person for whom English is a second language. Then there's people where, basically everything's a mess. I can generally tell them apart and judge accordingly...
Not to mention that, especially for comments, some people are probably typing from their phone. (Which is totally my excuse if you think my grammar is bad. ;) )
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I think your point about credibility is so important. If a contributor was too lazy to even check for basic errors, what else was that writer too lazy to do? I definitely judge a piece at least partly on the grammar, spelling, and punctuation, but like @telos, I make some--not a lot--of allowances if the ideas presented are inspiring or inspirational and coherent enough for me to extract them.
I think grammar matters to people who have mastered it and understand that it's a system of logic, and it doesn't matter to people who haven't mastered it. Tonight, I was scrolling through after a long day of writing, and I didn't even open blogs that had obvious mistakes in the visible content.
The easier a piece is to read generally the longer it took to write, because the writer took the time to refine ideas, to check facts, to find the right words, to check spelling and catch homophones, to vary sentence structure, to watch for problems such as dangling modifiers or lack of parallelism. Why shouldn't I reward that writer with my time, my upvote, and my comments?
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