[Air-L] Looking for references on grammatical prejucice

[maxigas]

From: Casey Tesfaye <klt35 at georgetown.edu>
Subject: [Air-L] Looking for references on grammatical prejucice
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2012 10:41:43 -0500

> I am looking for references that deal with the behavior of correcting
> grammar or spelling online, or the prejudices that often accompany these
> behaviors. For example, this would include commentary on news articles,
> where one commenter may misspell a word or two, and a subsequent commenter
> may "call out" the misspelling, or comments like "I stopped reading after I
> saw XX misspell Y."
> 
> Does anyone have any references like this to suggest?

Not an academic reference, but a good starting point is Eric S. Raymond's 'How To Become a Hacker', where one of the only four rules is to speak proper English:

"If your writing is semi-literate, ungrammatical, and riddled with misspellings, many hackers (including myself) will tend to ignore you. While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for sloppy thinkers. If you can't yet write competently, learn to."

Of course this comes from the fact that programming language code will not compile (or compile and not function correctly) if there is even one character which does not spelled correctly or if there is even one syntactical mistake, so I guess programmers pay more attention to such nuances in natural languages too.

The nice thing about this is it goes against the more widely popularised research results on the degradation of language in the ICT context (think teenagers and SMS, hackers and IRC chat channels, etc.).

maxigas, kiberpunk

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