CompuServe Thread

#Proper English

4 messages in this thread
#109329From: John DraperFeb 15, 1988 9:33 PM
I have noticed that there are a lot of typos, spelling errors, and grammatical errors in the messages here, and thought I'd post a little file about the proper use of English. Hope it helps. —————————– Pleeze Rite Good People what can't rite good haven't got no excuse. The rools of English grammer and speling isn't all that tuff to remember. 1. Don't use no double negatives. 2. Make each pronoun agree with their antecendent. 3. Join clauses good, like a conjunction should. 4. About them sentence fragments. 5. When dangling, watch your participles. 6. Verbs has to agree with their subject. 7. Just between you and I, case is important, too. 8. Don't write run-on sentences they are hard to read. 9. Don't use commas, which aren't necessary. 10. Try to not ever split infinitives. 11. Proofread your letters to see if any words out. 12. Corect speling is esential. Regrades, Larry.
#109336From: Nick Sullivan/TransactorFeb 15, 1988 9:49 PM
Gee, Larry, I think you're exaggerating the literacy problem on this forum, and that in itself is an error you should have warned against… careless exaggeration is the worst crime one can possibly commit. Nick
#109340From: Peter da SilvaFeb 15, 1988 9:58 PM
First you want to tell us how to use our programming languages (explicit typecasts on every other line, right?), now you want to control our human languages as well. Watch out, or I'll tell everyone what a wimp you really are :->.
#109352From: Nick Sullivan/TransactorFeb 15, 1988 10:14 PM
Peter, I was confused by the last line of your message to Larry ("Watch out, or I'll tell…"). Now, we all know that the word "watch" is a noun meaning "a portable timepiece", yet this didn't seem to fit the sense of the sentence. I finally figured it out, though, and I think what you wanted to do was cast "watch" to verb, thus: "(verb)Watch out, or I'll tell…" This kind of ambiguous use of critical values can lead to difficult problems in sentence debugging and, even worse – at some future time when you may not even be around to maintain your own message – total prose failure. Please keep the (noun)above in mind when coding future messages. Nick