If you've spent significant time in any particular online community, you've noticed that people typically fall into two categories:
- People whose writing is easy to understand because, for the most part, it's error-free and written clearly
- People whose writing is difficult to understand because it's riddled with spelling mistakes, lack of punctuation, run-on sentences, etc.
Here's What I Mean
These are not the most egregious examples, but they give you an idea:
Why Bother
My basic question is this. If you're participating in an online community, chances are it's because you want people to read what you wrote.
If you care about people reading what you write, why wouldn't you care about taking basic steps to make sure your message actually gets through? Seems contradictory to me.
Don't Waste My Time
Seriously, I'm busy enough. I don't have time to spend extra minutes, or even seconds, trying to decipher what you were trying to say. Heck, I have days where even milliseconds seem too long to waste on somebody who is making ME do all the work to read THEIR message.
If my brain finds that it's getting stuck in a quagmire of misspellings and unclear meaning, my busy brain tends to skip right over the text and find something else that's easier to read.
Don't get me wrong. One or two typos doesn't make a difference. Everyone makes one or two typos. I bet there are at least that many typos in this blog post. I'm talking about the posts that have egregious and/or frequent offenses to clear communication.
For instance, I was reading one day where a woman was complaining about her husband. She wrote, "He never abused me fisically, but..."
My brain read that as abused me fiscally. In other words, I thought she was saying that this guy had never stolen from her, or gambled away her life savings, or spent her money frivolously. I had read down another three or four sentences before I realized that she'd meant to say physically. I then had to go back and reread the entire paragraph now that I knew what she meant. And that, folks, is what I simply don't have time for in my life.
The Worst Part
The worst part is that, because I am so busy, I find myself falling into the trap of not editing myself when I've made a minor typo. I'm so tempted to just move on because I know it's minor, and let my readers decipher it because I know it won't take them very long.
But that is how it begins, my friends. And then it's a long downward spiral into being That Person. The one whose stuff nobody bothers to read because you'd have to chop through the errors with a machete like Indiana Jones hacking his way through the jungle.
