To all members,

In the past month or so I've been forced to edit around 200 comments for clarity and the usual mistakes are being made. As per usual I won't single out people and I realise that sometimes mistakes in grammar, punctuation and spelling are genuine mishaps.

That said, I would like everyone to pay more attention to how their postings look, with particular regard to the following:-

1. Spelling. I know from the site's statistics that many members have their browser language settings set to the default, which in most cases is US English. This is not good. Most of you live in Australia - please change your language settings so your browser's spell checker uses the Queen's English. Of course, for those living outside Australia it is quite understandable that you would use your local language settings. This website does automatically correct some common errors however this is not possible with all errors.

2. A more serious issue - I do expect more use of capitalisation for the start of sentences and for proper nouns. When members are addressing each other, the same applies - start their username with a capital letter - it just looks better and is a sign of respect for that person. This website hasn't permitted all-lower-case usernames for about seven years. For those who sign their comments manually instead of storing a signature, give yourself the big letter too - again, it looks better.

3. If your comment contains more than three or four sentences then you should be paragraphing your comments. A new paragraph should be started each time your comment sways in a different direction. Correct paragraphing is via two presses of the enter/return key, not one press.

4. An error that is becoming more common is the classic declaration of ownership with the incorrect use of apostrophes. I have been correcting a lot of posts where radio's should be radios, for example.

A good trick to getting things right is writing comments in your word processor and then copy/paste to the site. Word processors (again with correct language settings) are far more powerful than any website in this regard, with hundreds of errors being automatically corrected and at times happening so quickly one doesn't realise it has happened. One other advantage to doing this, especially with longer comments is that you will still have a temporary copy of what you have written if something happens to your internet connection or even this website, thus allowing the reposting of the comment if you miss the first time.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

Here here! I agree with you 100%. Not 110%.

And just when did "Railway Stations", become Train Stations?

Regards

Wayne.

Australian newspapers seem to be often spelling analogue 'analog'. I thought this shortened form of the word was a recent innovation by Techies, but note that my 1913 Funk & Wagnalls 'Standard Dictionary' has 'analog' as preferred. Not surprising as Dr Isaac Kaufmann Funk was an even more radical spelling reformer than his 19th-century counterpart Noah Webster. Dr Funk's son Wilfred started the Word Power feature in Readers' Digest which was continued, in turn, by Wilfred's son Peter.

Newspapers just cut and paste aggregated items these days, which means each article comes with the spelling from the nation its originating media outlet was based in. I don't think that is the right way to do things because it removes consistency and teaches kids that spelling isn't important. Who's going to tell a large media organisation that their style manual needs a re-write though?

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

I'm with you Brad, correct grammar is essential. English is our language in Australia, not the Americanised pseudo version. Where correct spelling may seem tedious, there are reasons why words are spelled the way they are.

I think the most important reason would be searching for information. Big search engines like Bing, Google and Yahoo tend to excuse country-specific spelling up to a point but the right results being as close to the top as possible is still better. The forum search feature on this site and indeed most forum software in popular use do not have the scope for this and for a search term to display in results the spelling must equal what is being looked for. For example, if I look for posts containing the term "colour television" the search will return links to posts containing just that but not "colour television". I suppose it depends on the word too. Searching for "analogue" would return results for "analogue" and "analog" because the two strings are constant for length of the shorter spelling. If I search for "analogue multimeter" then "analogue multimeter" would not be returned.

The thing that seems to be becoming more common is the mistake where people type "apple's" when they are describing "apples". The apostrophe, in this case, indicates that an apple owns something rather than the intended plural of "apple". It happens here but it happens on most of the discussion sites that are out there and this includes from professional journalists who really should know better, more-so than anyone else.

This site has a spell-check function and the conversion of various SI units of measurement to their symbols, such as Ohms and Microfarads, rides on this same feature. It can and does quite easily correct some mistakes but it can't correct the use of apostrophes because it isn't powerful enough to understand what context they are being used in. I don't have the time and the coding skills to bolt on any advanced improvement to this unfortunately.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

This site has a spell-check function

I think you mean a spelling check function, or maybe you're referring to things cast by witches and goblins?

Personally, I think a lot of American spelling reform started by Webster has merit. Nonsense endings on words like analogue were inflicted on the English language by the French invaders.

A living language and its spelling evolves constantly. If it didn't we'd still be talking like this:

QUOTE: But for to tellen yow of his array,
His hors weren goode, but he was nat gay;
Of fustian he wered a gypon
Al bismótered with his habergeon;
For he was late y-come from his viage,
And wente for to doon his pilgrymage.

However, correct English grammar is important for clarity of meaning, a point which is rammed home daily if you often deal with foreigners, as I do.

Lets eat Granma.
Lets eat, Granma.
Proper Grammar saves lives.

I have to say that I never was a fan of William Shakespeare's rantings (I can see all the true purists throw their hands up in horror at that comment), there were a lot of in-necessary words in his work. Such utterings were fairly normal for the 1500s though.

English is full of French, Latin, German and Greek words and the spellings of those pretty much came with the words. Even as little as 100 years ago terms such as "Roll of Honovr" and "Covrt Hovse" were commonplace adding a Latin overlay to some French words.

All English-speaking countries have their own variations on many aspects of English, none probably more unique than Australian Rhyming Slang, a habit brought to the colonies from Cockney, England and altered for local conditions. If you were anywhere but Australia and went into a shop and asked for a dog's eye with dead horse (meat pie with tomato sauce) you'd get a funny look.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

That's Chaucer from the 1400's. Willy had moved on from there, and often invented his own words and spelled the same word in more than one way.

There is a wonderful piece of script floating about as to what would happen if Mother England reclaimed America. One item was to teach them proper English and Grammar. Eg. They can not only not spell Aluminium, but they cannot pronounce it either.

Quite amusing if you spot it. I think I have wiped the last version I got?

On page 2780 of my grandpa's 'Standard Dictionary' (purchased in Melbourne in 1918) there is the "31 Rules for Spelling Simplification" from Anglo-American Boards like the British Simplified Spelling Society of 1908 - that included Oxford Dictionary philologists. But it was quixotic for progressives like Isaac Funk et al to think they could change tradition: I check through all 31 and only half of the rules gained traction in US and two in Britain!

Bump. A gentle reminder is due, refer to Post 1.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...