Take a little time to preefrood
I’ll file this ramble under web standards because it is about standards on the web. The general quality of writing on the web never ceases to disappoint. I don’t mean the subjective matter of how interesting a website is or how thoughtfully articulated a blog post’s argument; I mean the careless way that people write.
You can (arguably) indulge the typical blogger for being an amateur writer. Freedom of expression isn’t just for those with a certain degree of education. I lose count though of how often I see for example, an inexperienced web designer berated for their poor grasp of semantic HTML by others who ought to be more troubled by their own grasp of basic spelling.
When professionals get sloppy, it’s embarrassing. Take the word “schadenfreude” – a German word with no exact English equivalent which means pleasure taken from someone else’s misfortune.
What a word for MacUser magazine to misspell in a recent post about Rob Enderle. I can’t deny it’s fun to highlight Enderle’s stupidity, but it’s better still when people trip over their own pretentiousness. I bet commenter #1 had schadenfreude indicating that blunder. I’ll close then with a few tips for those writing on the web:
- Inch marks are not the same as quote marks “ ”
- A hyphen is not the same as an en dash –
- Those little red lines underneath your words indicate misspellings
- Take a moment to fix them
That concludes today’s rant.
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