Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Blogs are really useful because they give anyone the forum to talk about whatever they want, and the popularity and influence of the blog is generally determined by the quality of the material they produce. After all, most people don’t want to read junk.

Since blogs are usually informal, you need to learn to forgive typos and minor errors, but too many or just bad mistakes can really take away from your message. For example, just today I read the following in different posts, “Education is emenselly over-rated” and “Their is even language in their for …”

I just can’t get past those mistakes. In the first case, it’s a really bad misspelling and an unnecessary hyphen when talking about education being overrated (that’s good irony). The second sentence uses the wrong “there” twice in six words! I ended up missing the message of posts, because of the distractions.

And yes, I openly admit that I’m a typo-intensive writer and I’m generally to lazy to go back and edit my posts (it’s a blog after all). I just hope that I don’t come across as stupid because of any of my typos.

Recently, I noticed that I’m more likely to make a typo with smileys. A lot of times, I write :-) instead of :-(. This is awkward if I write something like, “Sorry I’m busy that night, so I can’t see you when you’re in town :-)”

Someone should write a spell/grammar checker that will catch those mistakes. I can guarantee you’ll have at least one customer. :-)