You wonder just what calls out the ire in persons when they leave a comment that feels rather hypocritical. In case you’re wondering, it was left on my practise-related post, hence the truly evident stab. Too bad it was a bad stab. Have a look yourself, it’s not too long a read:
practise writing english
I decided to delete it as spam, but now I think that’s too bad, as it made me laugh a little. Let’s dissect.
- A proper sentence should start with a capital, bar a few exceptions. A very few.
- A proper sentence is supposed to end with punctuation. In this case, I see only a few possibilities that could work: “!”, “.” and “…”.
- English is a language: it must be capitalised (I’m not using “should” here, as people tend to then think they’re free to do whatever they please).
- It’s an attack. Few will argue that this is meant as a friendly constructive remark regarding my writing skills1.
Some tips for those to comment: don’t attack without sound arguments; don’t tell me what to do; don’t be stupid. Hey! That’s a pretty easy list to remember!
On this topic, by the way: if you spot mistakes in my English—it happens to the best of us, and to me a little bit more often—, just tell me about it via e-mail, IM or even in the comments. As long as it’s constructive, I don’t see any problem with it. We’re here to learn, right?
- I know this doesn’t say anything about the form of the comment, only about the contents, but I consider it worth noting. ←
When I feel a slight irk in things, I try to find out what the problem is. I mean, there usually is a problem when I feel an irk. I evaluate the problem, think about it a lot, think about a possible solution and then play with ways of solving it. I’ve noticed how improving things in a playful manner pays off a lot more than just “regular” improvement; for my personal satisfaction, it does.
An example. I didn’t like writing. With pen or pencil or whatever. Just plain writing. I just didn’t like it. It was a mess to read and I just couldn’t see myself in it: to put it simply, I hated it. I knew what the problem was. I hadn’t practised writing for myself for quite a while. Best I had were some notes on my desk. I knew that I had to change things, so I looked at the letter shapes the next time I was jotting down things in class. I tried to give them all a consistent size. I gave my ascenders serifs. I added ligatures (I’m a typophile) and special letter combinations and I had lots of fun doing that. You may consider that nerdy, but it was fun. A good two weeks of practice, most of it in class, had made my handwriting pretty neat. I am actually proud of it. I now write a lot, because it’s a heck of a lot of fun to write things that simply look so nice!
There is now an image of it that I drew, then photographed myself!
There is a point in this?
There is a point in this indeed. If something isn’t right, work on it. If solving it doesn’t work as well as you had hoped, try and make it fun. What I did was finally putting my typophile heart in it. I made sure I was working towards something that would be fun to look at, and above all, I made sure I liked to do it. What works for me could work for you.
One thing, though, that still bothers me about my handwriting: my numerals. Anyone has tips regarding numerals in handwriting?
Zooiblog