Spelling and Grammar

Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but I’m sure 100 years from now sociologists and historians will be studying tweets, especially as they’re more systematically archived and documented than anything else before the 21st century. In fact it’s going to be interesting to see history changed from a discipline relying on individual scholars painstakingly combing through individual ancient texts into one which also utilizes big data and statistical techniques to give insight.

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And psychologists will definitely want to study Trump’s tweets.

Sorry, couldn’t help myself.:smirk:

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If the problem of obsolete platforms is solved, then historians will certainly study tweets for their sociological value (although I have a relative staying at present, a senior historian, who is skeptical about how good history will be done in future for that very reason).

But although good work on the genetics of Adam has been done by several scholars on a BioLogos thread, I doubt that much of value will come from tweets. And even the former will depend on somebody writing it into a tractable form in paper or books, ideally with decent editing and spell-checking.

It’s part of the art of good communication, ie what used to be taught as rhetoric.

One of my best reads this year, published by Springer Academic, follows the common custom of saving costs by getting the author to proof read. Despite spelling checkers, the errors are sufficient to make reading difficult, and in a couple of places to be misleading. The author is good - but not in terms of careful grammar and spelling.

To steal an example of my (grammatically careful) father, on the error of placing prepositions at the end of sentences, it’s not a book I’d want to be read to out of from.

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I definitely agree that properly edited and spell-checked books and articles (and perhaps increasingly websites) will still be the main medium of serious scholarly discussion. But with the advent of tweeting and texting, the newer generation of young people (younger than even me, as I mostly write in “regular” grammar and syntax) have developed their own system of grammar, abbreviations, and syntax that has its own rules. For example, adding a period to the end of a sentence of a text can completely change its connotation and tone. What an older generation might view as simply laziness or lack of ability to use language “properly” might just be a natural evolution in language, shaped by technology. Even for me, emojis can often convey much more than any combination of words can. :grin:

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Hey don’t put us all in the same box. Me, while I might use wrong grammar because english is not my first language, I usually don’t use things like lol, omg, wtf (there, I prefer to use full words although I will try my hardest not to use them on this forum) etc.

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