Pronunciation of manufacturers' names

[Marco]

Lol - most interesting!

Marco.

[Beobloke]

Written English is a different matter. Not a big deal on forums but for official and work-related communication I expect it all to be spot on grammar and spelling-wise. There's no excuses these days. Get the computer to do it for you if you have to. Despite that the standard seems to be dropping daily.

Get the computer to do grammar and spelling for you? Hmmm, I know a poem about that...

Eye halve a spelling chequer,
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a quay and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
It's rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
It's letter perfect awl the weigh
My spell chequer tolled me sew.

[Barry]

Have a go at decoding this. It's a cartoon they used to run in the local paper. Took me years:

What is so difficult about that? Just read it phonetically.

[Macca]

That's an easy one.

[Marco]

Yet it took you years to 'decode'?

Marco.

[Mike Reed]

Btw, whether it's for work or on forums, you should always try and write as well as you can, using proper English. As they say, if you don't use it, you lose it!

As far as forums go, it really annoys me when seemingly well-educated people are too lazy to punctuate properly or apply proper sentence structures, in turn making their posts difficult to read...

Mind you, if they sat their asses down at a proper keyboard, rather than typing on a bloody phone, it might help!!

Marco.

I like it ! I am a total pedant, so my support is questionable, though. I have to mention the oft-repeated horrors of the greengrocer's apostrophe and its/it's, who's/whose, plus their/there and many other misused homophones. However, it's the lack of paragraphs in a long post which throws me; I get about half-way and start drooping. Oh yes, and the use of 'fora' instead of 'forums'. Pretentious, n'est-ce-pas?

There's a chap with an odd pseudonym on another forum who is quite prolific but invariably posts two or three hundred word paragraphs. It looks to be quite informative stuff on the whole, but I haven't yet managed a whole post so I'm not sure !

Spell-check, or whatever it's called, is useful in exposing (usually typographical) errors, but I'm not sure it can help in other ways (esp. homophones)

[Mike Reed]

I don't speak it because I'm not from round here. I could talk scouse you could not understand in a million years mind.

Scouse doesn't hold a candle to Geordie. All is lost when you venture north-west of the border, though.

[walpurgis]

Btw, whether it's for work or on forums, you should always try and write as well as you can, using proper English. As they say, if you don't use it, you lose it!

Marco.

I agree with that Marco.

Most members seem reasonably educated and literate, so any lack of coherence and intelligibility in posts is probably laziness.

The main bugbear for me and others I'm sure, is the regular lack of paragraphing. I tend to ingore large 'slabs' of text.

[Marco]

However, it's the lack of paragraphs in a long post which throw me; I get about half-way and start drooping. Oh yes, and the use of 'fora' instead of 'forums'. Pretentious, n'est-ce-pas?

Indeed; I simply switch off! It's mostly nothing other than sheer laziness, so pretty inexcusable, although typing on a mobile phone doesn't help. I simply couldn't cope with the teeny-tiny keys and the (achingly) annoying, and unhelpfully intrusive, predictive text!

As for 'fora', again we're in agreement. The term is grammatically correct, but simply too stilted for use within informal communication. There's a balance between using proper English, in order to make yourself understood, and sounding like a tit

Spell-checking software is fine, as you say, for highlighting typographical errors, but is virtually useless for correcting anything grammatical. In that respect, it's about as useful as 'Google Translate', when attempting to decipher a foreign language!

Marco.

[spendorman]

I agree with that Marco.

Most members seem reasonably educated and literate, so any lack of coherence and intelligibilty in posts is probably laziness.

The main bugbear for me and others I'm sure, is the regular lack of paragraphing. I tend to ingore large 'slabs' of text.

This is surprising, as a lot of us here are, or were engineers, and engineers often used to have poor written English. lol!