Quote: Original post by lightbringer

So you don't read your own posts before posting them? :D

I see mistakes all the time. In newspapers, in books, in blogs, in forum posts (a LOT in forum posts), all over the place, often by native speakers. Sure, it bothers me a little. Even things like not capitalizing personal pronouns referring to the other party in written German letters, which is not only wrong but also rude. There's not much I can do about it, so what I do instead is try to avoid making mistakes myself when communicating (and I do make them, make no mistake [super-lame pun fully intended]).

I agree. I think it has more to do with finding spelling errors in texts that are supposed to not have them what bother me most (I mean, my posts don't go through an editorial before getting published here). I fully expect finding errors in forum posts, it's like a challenge for communicating/understanding what a "normal" guy wants to say.

Quote: Original post by Momoko_Fan
You have started coding a lot a couple of months ago, your bug-detector has been developed. Now you find bugs everywhere, and so in the books you read as well.

I like that. :)

This really annoys me. In forum posts I can overlook mistakes (although I still have to resist the temptation to correct people - I've found that people are never very grateful ;) ). However, I see mistakes in the text on packaging, advertisements in magazines, and so many in novels and textbooks. The simple typos are easier to forgive, but errors such as using the wrong form of they're/their/there make me twitch. Mistakes do make it harder to parse the text, and I find myself imagining the author of the text as being somewhat stupider than they probably are - which makes it harder to trust what they are saying. I just can't help it.

I am even annoyed by two spaces where only one space should be.

Quote: Original post by DevFred
I am even annoyed by two spaces where only one space should be.

Any you know what's awesome? There is never a time in English where you need to use two spaces at once. The space after periods is just one space, no matter what your elementary school teacher taught you. If you need larger blocks of white space, that's what the tab key is for. For that matter, people who format white space in text documents by typing space until the text is roughly where they think it should be should be beaten.

Quote: Original post by shaolinspin
but errors such as using the wrong form of they're/their/there make me twitch.

That's the worst offender. It's the easiest to get right (along with its/it's), yet paradoxically the one that trips up the most people. It even found its way into the new Wheel of Time novel (which was brilliant nevertheless). What's ironic is how we live in an age of advanced spell-checkers/grammar-checkers yet people have more trouble with language than ever before. ^_^;;;

I should talk you two into trying out XNA then. Someone in the XNA team has this habit and you will find lots of sentences with two spaces after each period. Like this. It's all over the docs and code examples :)

Yes, I tend to notice those things, too. It's a bit annoying when I read novels because it sometimes kicks me right out of the flow. In technical literature, I can read right over one or two. But if the text is riddled with such mistakes, I begin to doubt the author's skills not only in written english, but also in his field of expertise, whether they deserve it or not.

How many f's are there in the following sentence?

Finished files are the result
of years of scientific study
combined with the experience
of years.

echo "Finished files are the resultof years of scientific studycombined with the experienceof years." | fold -w1 |  tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | sort | uniq -c | grep 'f'

After high school I worked as a translator for a year and it totally ruined my life. Every day I learned something new about my native language and now I notice errors everywhere. On billboards, in books, in leaflets, in menus, in magazines, hell, even grafitti bums me out nowadays if it has grammar/style issues. And it's not just written language, it made me start notice people who use wrong language constructs in their speech too.

All in all, once you start noticing these things, it only gets worse. I hope for your sake, that you can get past it and enjoy blissful ignorance once more :)

Regarding English, it gets to me when people confuse their/there/they're and your/you're or when they say "could care less" when they mean "couldn't care less". I don't understand how a native speaker can mess up something so simple.

Quote: Original post by Cygon
I should talk you two into trying out XNA then. Someone in the XNA team has this habit and you will find lots of sentences with two spaces after each period.  Like this.  It's all over the docs and code examples :)

I thought the two spaces after a period thing was part of the style of typewritten text. I'm sure thats what I was told in typing class. Now two periods in the middle of a sentence is a bit annoying.