MVS posting standards:Sentences, Paragraphs, Punctuation, No text talk Please

[jmmxc]

Keep in mind this is the international forum with native and non-native English speakers, you like it or not

I think it is an important matter worthy of everyone's opinions. I can observe, based on some of the posts I have read, that people overseas in general, where English is not their primary language, tend to express themselves as best as they can (without the extra fluff) even though grammatically imperfect. I think there are folks that allow themselves to be swept by the rip currents of our nowadays social networks' jargons to the point that they believe proper grammar or manner is not that much important. And with the advent of email, text messaging and other long distance scripting, studies found that some people feel somehow liberated and not obligated to adhere to appropriate communication styles. One of the reasons is understood to be the fact that people hide behind aliases, avatar, a username of some sort, and distance.
Our role is to write, inform, educate, and learn from each other.
Let us strive to be technically concise, grammatically correct in a manner consistent to the English language.
thanks,
jmmxc

[bigkev414]

Don't worry, even the best American English is near-gibberish compared to actual English. Listening to it is even worse.

LOL

You have to be joking: this from a SCOTT ?? Awa wi ya ya wee eejut!

[bigkev414]

This is a pertinent subject........A recent example was a sports news headline on Fox sports referring to a high profile football coach. The headline read: 'Worsfold resigns'. This caused massive shockwaves throughout the football community. What the article went on to explain was that the coach referred to had re-signed for a further 3 years with his current club. Whoever prepared the item either didn't know (probable) or forgot to leave the hyphen between re and signs, thus creating the opposite of what was intended.

[turbozutek]

Don't worry, even the best American English is near-gibberish compared to actual English. Listening to it is even worse.

LOL

You have to be joking: this from a SCOTT ?? Awa wi ya ya wee eejut!

It's worse than that... It's from a SCOT!

Excellent Scots though, I'm impressed! Only improvment I could make would be; 'wi ye, ya wee'

Chris...

[bigkev414]

nay bother.

[matthew1]

This is a pertinent subject........A recent example was a sports news headline on Fox sports referring to a high profile football coach. The headline read: 'Worsfold resigns'. This caused massive shockwaves throughout the football community. What the article went on to explain was that the coach referred to had re-signed for a further 3 years with his current club. Whoever prepared the item either didn't know (probable) or forgot to leave the hyphen between re and signs, thus creating the opposite of what was intended.

Excellent point. Even journalists are making (more) mistakes these days. I too see terrible writing from news organizations... stories that have obviously not had an editor read them.

I went to journalism school* and the mistakes I see at sites like Yahoo! news and the like would get an "F" grade (fail).

Part of the problem is that writing, because of the Internet, has become diluted. The pool of writers has been enlarged 10000x, so the price of writing has naturally gone down. Thus, we have poor writing making its way into commodity arenas like news writing.

Anyway, to add to my original post, texting language** and technical language are so different as to be opposites. Texting language is what I'm (and you all as a chorus) are railing against. Thanks for the support on this topic. Feel free to be mildly stern*** when we encounter that here. I will back you up.

And to reiterate: non-English speakers are not subject to these grammatical standards. I lived in a non-English speaking country for 3 years so I know what it's like for you. I've found Google Translate to do a decent job.


* how I ended up running a Volvo site I have no idea

** "got 98v70 need hlp wont turn lft only rght"

*** don't get angry, perhaps something like "Please restate your post in readable form. See this for a guideline."

[obayha]

Guilty as charged.

[RBH]

Thank you for taking a stand on this issue. The pleasure of using this site has always been enhanced by the civility and clarity of communication. This was brought home to me by my visit to another Volvo oriented site that had numerous posts utilizing English words but lacking grammar, spelling, and punctuation to the point that it was impossible to discern meaning at times. These were clearly native speakers, by the way. The occasional rudeness there was just a bonus. I would rather participate here.

Bob

[V850B5254T]

About writing proper English from a keen user of MVS.

Using a proper English is the basis for communication on this homepage.
When communicating it is very useful if everybody agrees to the interpretation of the words used.
It limits confusion about the subject to a minimum and helps everybody to get the correct solution(s) to their problems.

Shouting in any way, shape or form have never helped to solve a technical problem, thus keeping the text on a proper level is the way to go.

However, I have some comments and questions about writing proper English.
___

Sentence length:
The length of sentences is partly determined by culture.
In Danish (my native language) sentences are in general longer (sometime very much longer) than they would be in proper English.
Though I communicate a lot with US companies through my work, I always have to force myself to limit the length of my sentences....
For that reason you might receive entries from countries outside the English-speaking world with unacceptable long sentences.
___

Numbers:
English is not my native language, but as an electronic engineer I like exact information.
In my world ‘1’ is more exact than ‘one’.

I’m asking because I don’t know:
Which numbers should be spelled (one, two, three…) and which should be in Arabic numbers (1, 2, 3…)?
E.g.: ‘ten’ or ‘10’, ‘twenty’ or ‘20’, ‘hundred’ or ‘100’…
___

Google Translate:
I use Google Translate when encountering Russian, Chinese or other languages I’m not familiar with to get an understanding of the content.
To use it as a translation tool between e.g. Danish and English is (excuse me my French) foolish. The result is pure nonsense and would not be regarded as proper English in this forum.
___

Regards for the effort spend to run MVS

/oakey

[Ozark Lee]

In my world ‘1’ is more exact than ‘one’.

Point well taken but Matt's original context was in reference to one of the serial offenders we have now that throws up words like "some1" or "be4". I don't know that that was adequately conveyed in his original post but it has been the subject of conversation in the locker room where Matt and the moderators discuss issues about the board out of public view.

Sentence length really isn't a problem so long as it is not a run on sentence and it is properly punctuated. We had a poster a couple of months ago that that got quite irritated with me when I called him out for a 26 line run on sentence that had absolutely no capitalization or punctuation. It was unreadable.

You are correct in that precision and accuracy are the keys to technical posting. I guess we EE's think the same way.

...Lee