OT: literacy

yes - I believe it's too much to ask

It probably goes hand-in-hand w/ public-education in large-part falling farther and farther behind as time goes by compared to the rest of the world.

IMO gov can't do anything well nor efficiently – thus I personally feel education would be better if it's was privatized.

Because half the time we post we probably are "text messaging a drunk stripper" and it is "written while driving."

Sry :)

Give me a break. Almost everybody has some form of spell check. Most of the errors are due to fat fingers, alcohol or pot. Read what you want and ignore the rest.

Smartphones also probably contribute to the phenomenon – it''s harder to type w/ them and IDK how good/easy a spell-checker they have – since it's hard to type w/ them; many people may use poor grammar in an attempt to type the least possible.

^^pretty darn difficult actually

No -- it's not too much to ask. Sadly, however, you're pissing into the wind. Too many people write at the same low level whether they're writing a business letter, an email to a customer, a post to a discussion board, or a text to their bro. Part of literacy is an ability to write in different "registers", but this ability is in stark decline.

Pet peeves of mine:
1. your/you're: You're obligated to check your spelling.
2. their/they're/their: There is no good reason that they're not proofreading their posts.
3. its/it's: It's unfair to judge a discussion board by its posters.
4. to/too/two: Two of these elementary errors in one post are too many to bear.
5. lose/loose: A poster who plays fast and loose with his spelling loses my respect.

Seriously, these things should have been learned in grade school and retained in adulthood. In fact, people who make these mistakes should be BAND from this board :)

Yo, older peeps, the desk top computer is now a relic. Most communication and internet-based activities are done on the phone

@Gawker, doesn't bother me a bit, it drives me fucking nuts. Some days are worse than others. And I hate when one of my posts slip through with a typo or two.

Some good stuff @MrDuece

Oh, and I see no end in sight for the misspellings and incoherent posts.

@Corvus I already admitted I was drunk...

@GACA, but at least you are literate, and funny too.

Smartphones change words we wouldn't expect sometimes and I'll admit I don't always check my posts as cogently as I should. I do all of my postings and reviews from my phone now and it's a pain in the ass sometimes. Even this post has had words changed by the phone I didn't want. If I'm in a hurry some things slip through the cracks. As long as I can decifer what the person was trying to say I don't think about it too much or if it's mad ramblings I'll ignore it.
Sometimes the autocorrects are pretty funny imo.

Mr. Duece: Check your #2! ;-)

Papi, I don't agree that privatization would help a thing. I think the biggest problem is parents who:

1. Put everything on the teachers while they don't use, speak or write with proper grammar themselves.

2. Don't check that their kids are attending classes and doing their assigned homework.

3. Don't insist that their local school boards set high standards for hiring and performance of teachers and are not willing to pay for it.

School systems are uneven across the country. Houston accepted thousands of Katrina refugees. Many of the students were utterly unmotivated, lazy, enamoured of the gangsta lifestyle and had inferior previous education. They were disruptive and dragged the whole system down. My sister-in-law lived through that mess as a lead math teacher before she retired. In her retirement she is a teacher of teachers at the college level.

Good school systems do exist. West Jefferson Hills in Pittsburgh, as well as Bethel Park and Mt. Lebanon in the South Hills suburbs are all excellent. When my daughter submitted her first freshman English paper at South Carolina, her professor commented that it was a pleasure to grade a paper from somebody who knew how to write and even understood footnotes. She easily tested out of the freshman math requirement despite having been only an average math student at WJH. Virtually nobody in those communities felt any need to send their kids to private schools. Those that did generally changed their minds and enrolled their students in the public schools when they realized that WJH was the best and most cost effective place for their kids.

Yeah, posting on mobile makes it tougher

Like rh48hr I post and write reviews on my phone. It takes forever for me to write reviews on the phone, at least a hour.

ATACdawg: Oops! That one got past me -- and I thought I proofread my post!
Correction: 2. their/they're/there
Pot . . . kettle . . . black

Mrdeuce - your typo is the reason I don't hold everyone to such a high standard. There are times you can tell people aren't great writers but many times I think it's an honest mistake or even an auto correct they didn't anticipate.

I don't mind the occasional typo or misspelling or grammatical error. And I understand that some people post from phones, which makes writing harder. (I post from my MacBook or iPad.)

What I do mind is the incomprehensible gibberish that some people post as discussions or reviews. These people are too lazy to try to write something that others would want to read.

I type almost everything on my iPhone, and occasionally on my iPad. But as much as I love Apple devices, the keyboard sucks. So while I don't think my writing has egregious typos, some errors are virtually unavoidable even though I usually proofread. But yeah the crap that looks like it was written by an immigrant who just started English 101 is idiotic. I usually just ignore it.

Education is hard.

And it wouldn't hurt for some of the more prolific writers on here to abbreviate a little less especially some of the more esoteric terms . Most of us know the more common terms like LOL or LMFAO, but what the fuck is an OP or AFAIK, thanks guys.

OP: Original Post.
AFAIK: As far as I know.

When I'm retired, I'll play lots of shuffleboard, eat dinner at 4:30, and proofread.

Tonight is one of those rare occasions when I'm on a computer and a spellchecker is turned on. Usually my ipad is changing words on me and if I only had 2 or 3 hours of sleep, there's no telling what gibberish I might be posting.

Since I don't get any extra credit for typing proper sentences etc. I tend to ignore it on occasion.

Yes, it bothers me. Your and you're is one that irritates the most. Of course there are many others. Their and there, for example. Lack of capitalization and sentence structure.

There is no real education in schools any longer. But they do teach BS!

U know, gawker, I h8 it whn ppl txt 2mch...................

I agree wit u guys who tink its teh pubic skool system to blame. In Fact! lets go even fartherer and blaim obama and the muzlims! thems thars the reel kulprits!

Probably 8 out of 10 teachers are diligent and hard working professionals. But after seeing interviews with some of the teachers during the public school strikes in Chicago and Detroit over the past 10 years, I saw that many teaching are barely literate themselves. How can we expect the students to be literate when the teachers are of such low quality?

Half the time spell check spells the wrong word trying to correct you. And I suspect some are just too lazy to proofread. I think some just don't care and some are illiterate.

It's Founder's fault for having a program that doesn't allow editing! Plus, my Explorer lost its spell check in a virus and everything I've tried has not restored it. I'm now using Mozilla so hopefully I'll catch my errors.

Just saw in another topic, about tipping, that a dancer was "greatful" for her gift card tip.

rockstar666,

Any idea why founder won't allow editing?

I know in other sites, editing was allowed. When "corrected," the poster would change one of the top most posts making the posters below look like idiots.

We should be allowed to edit our own posts. I don't know if it's a question of policy or something else that we can't. Maybe he'll chime in?

Mr. O sez, "Yes, it bothers me. Your and you're is one that irritates the most. Of course there are many others. Their and there, for example."

But evidently, "to" and "too" isn't an issue for you. lol

https://www.tuscl.net/postread.php?PID=3…

I only think it's annoying when it's so bad that it seems they aren't even trying. It shows disrespect for others on the board. I don't blame the school system. It's just a matter of so many more people texting and posting so many more things nowadays then there ever used to be. Mostly from people whose writing never would have been seen in public 20 years ago. All self-edited, so to speak, with no gatekeeper to keep out the junk. For the most part, that's a good thing.

I read threads on my laptop and on my phone. Occasionally, if i'm only posting a very short reply I'll do it on my phone although I'd be willing to bet most people will argue i never post any short replies. 99% of the time I will only type a reply on my MBP. Sometimes i'll use the quick reply box but if it's a longer response I'll actually type it up in Word and then proof read it before I c&p it to the forums. I hate spelling and grammatical mistakes and try to catch errors before I post.

Spelling mistakes I can overlook to a point because I know most people type on their phones now but what irks me are the blatant grammatical mistakes. To and too, they're and there or their, your and you're. etc...... Also the people who obviously have no comprehension of english composition make me shake my head. Throwing a bunch of sentence fragments together into a paragraph that have no common ground with each other is just a mess. There are posts I just skip if I try to get through the first couple of sentences and it's making no sense.

It really drives me crazy listening to the sports networks when some of their ex-jock commentators come across as nearly illiterate. They are supposed to be high achool, let alone college graduates.

And why can't people get "me" and "I" straight?

(Yes, I know that a simple sentence can't start with "and" - just a bit of irony! Did anyone notice my little bit of "Duece" irony?)

This isn't a freakin NY Times column – it's a strip-club website – so what if some spelling mistakes get thru as long as one grasps the meaning of what the poster was trying to say.

^^^ Officer Papi_Chulo has spoken!

How about math illiteracy:

1) sometimes when I go to the deli dept in the store I'll ask for a 1/3 lb of cheese – it seems like 1/3 of the time they don't know what a 1/3 is (I guess they are used to just being asked for 1/2 a lb or 1 lb)

2) I was having a cheap lunch at a cafeteria I often visit – the total was $5.22 – I gave her a $20 and did not feel like receiving $14.78 in change; i.e. did not want the 4 singles – so when she was giving me my change back, $14.78, I told her I've give her an extra $1 so she could give me back a $10 and a $5 (for a total of $15.78 instead) and the lady was stumped and could not figure it out

^ that was too much math for her. She could have gotten a job at burger king if she was that good at math.

Papi_Chulo,

You want to confuse the hell out of someone? Go thru a drive thru and when the total is whatever, say $7.48 Give them a 10 or 20, then say, I've got the 3 cents and hand it to them. They have no fucking idea! One even called a manager over and he didn't know either. He told her to void the order and start over. Really???