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Reconsider allowing texting-talk?

Windroid

Windroid

Android Enthusiast
The rules of this site allow texting-talk, and other non-standard forms of English. Perhaps it's time to reconsider. Multiple times: Someone's come to this site, and it's been difficult to understand him because of his non-standard English. I'm starting to consider just not responding when someone who (for example) doesn't capitalize the first letter of a sentence asks for help with an Android problem.

To be clear: This is not about people who are still learning English! It's one thing if English is your second language, and you have trouble with it. It's another thing if you're not even trying. And if you don't capitalize the first letter of a sentence, if you spell the word "you" as "u", then you're not even trying.
 
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Windroid said:
The rules of this site allow texting-talk, and other non-standard forms of English. Perhaps it's time to reconsider. Multiple times: Someone's come to this site, and it's been difficult to understand him because of his non-standard English. I'm starting to consider just not responding when someone who (for example) doesn't capitalize the first letter of a sentence asks for help with an Android problem.

To be clear: This is not about people who are still learning English! It's one thing if English is your second language, and you have trouble with it. It's another thing if you're not even trying. And if you don't capitalize the first letter of a sentence, if you spell the word "you" as "u", then you're not even trying.
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As a Brit I tend to feel that people who leave out the second "i" in aluminium aren't even trying ;)

No, seriously, I think your second idea is the better one: if their message is incomprehensible, because they've written it as a single, unstructured, unpunctuated block, then just don't reply. Or tell them what the problem is and see whether they make an effort to be readable, and if they aren't prepared to help people understand their problem then that is their problem. We don't get them often, some will make an effort if you ask, some perhaps aren't even able to (we don't know, we just see what we each write). I think I prefer the inclusive and accepting style of the forum, though where someone's post is genuinely incomprehensible then the best way to help them may be to explain that and give them another chance, so I figure that's OK.

Though I did try that politely once with one member who got utterly furious with me for daring to suggest that their 25 lines of lower-case text with no punctuation at all might be hard to follow! Fortunately their response was also completely incomprehensible, so I didn't lose any sleep over it ;). They did actually remain with the site for many years, and very gradually learned to put a little bit of structure into their posts, though they have always remained hard work to read.
 
Indeed, so there's a judgement call. If you are not confident that it's clear, ask for clarification. I believe I saw one of our mods make such a request today. But that judgement has to be made anyway, whether it's for a member to ask for clarification or decide they don't want to deal with a post, or whether it's for a moderator to decide that a post doesn't meet a required standard and demand a rewrite or delete the post/thread? A rule like that will never be clear cut: there will always be posts that are clearly one side of the line or another, but the line will be fuzzy and its location will be subjective.
 
i just point out that what they posted is almost unreadable. and that i can't help unless i understand what is going on.

most of the times these kind of posts are just rants and paranoia. and i now just try to ignore those posts.
 
Hadron said:
Indeed, so there's a judgement call. If you are not confident that it's clear, ask for clarification.
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But even then, confidence is relative. The farther you are from standard English, the greater the chance of misunderstanding. But there's another matter here too:
ocnbrze said:
i just point out that what they posted is almost unreadable. and that i can't help unless i understand what is going on.

most of the times these kind of posts are just rants and paranoia. and i now just try to ignore those posts.
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You don't capitalize the first letter of a sentence, but I don't have trouble reading your posts, because you otherwise make the effort to make your posts readable. Frankly: I don't think that's common among people who post in nocaps! I think if we have basic expectations, like capitalizing the first letter of a sentence, we'll have more people bothering to make their posts readable.

It's broken windows. Prohibit nocaps, and other forms of texting-talk, and more folks will make their posts readable without needing to be asked to do so. Then we can avoid the awkwardness of asking people to make their posts readable. Instead of worrying about making the guy feel insulted, we can just point to the rule. Then, hopefully, he'll post in a readable way and that will be that.
 
ocnbrze said:
yeah i am too lazy to capitalize. i do like to group together my thoughts........LOL
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Me, I'm too lazy to not capitalize! Or rather, too lazy to bother with code-switching between texting-talk and standard English. Standard English is what I've read all my life, it's what I've spoken all my life, so I'm sticking with it. I'm going to learn another language, it's going to be a worthwhile language such as Spanish.

Which brings me to another point: I'm a native English speaker, and even I have trouble understanding texting talk! Some folks out their struggle to understand even standard English. Prohibiting texting-talk would make it easier for folks who speak English as a second language to read, and participate, in this forum.

In other words: By being inclusive of folks who speak texting-talk, we're excluding folks who speak English as a second language.
 
if their english is not good.....they can always use Google Translate and type away in their native language and then copy and paste the english translation.

never heard of the term text-talking. this is the first i have heard of it. i get what it means, just never heard it used before.
 
StevenRaccoon said:
Por que?
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Chris Farley Idk GIF
 
ocnbrze said:
if their english is not good.....they can always use Google Translate and type away in their native language and then copy and paste the english translation.

never heard of the term text-talking. this is the first i have heard of it. i get what it means, just never heard it used before.
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You misunderstand. I'm not saying that folks use texting-talk, because their English is bad. I'm saying that, when folks have bad English, using texting-talk instead of standard English makes it needlessly difficult them to read your (generic "your") posts.
 
Windroid said:
You misunderstand. I'm not saying that folks use texting-talk, because their English is bad. I'm saying that, when folks have bad English, using texting-talk instead of standard English makes it needlessly difficult them to read your (generic "your") posts.
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for me that is not my concern. this is an english only site.....including "text talking". when i post something, its not out of concern on how other people who are ESL(englisg as a second language) can read it......that is on them to understand. its not like iwant to exclude them from the conversation.
 
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