Speling Errers in You're Sights
This morning I got another "you can't spell" email:
'You have a great
site here (trully). But having the word "organized" spelled incorrectly
in the first sentence a visitor reads is a bit of a turn off.'
Now I'm
glad to be able to say that WDVL gets very few complaints these days, in
large part because I've always paid attention to user's comments, and
acted on them if at all feasible. But of all the complaints, this one is
by far the commonest - and I never do anything about it!
Except perhaps to respond that my spelling
('organised') can be found in many English dictionaries,
and even some American dictionaries - with (Br.) after it.
Well, I am 'trully' amazed that there are people surfing the
WORLD-wide
web who havn't yet latched onto the fact that there are variants of the
American language out there. They call it 'English' and yet I wonder if
they've noticed that funny little man-shaped island off the coast of
France (where they really do spell funny !) called 'England'.
Is the
similarity of names a coincidence? Ah well, they bought Britannica;
perhaps they could buy the
OED and fix it up..
Of course, living in the USA I can't simply ignore the fact that most
of the text I deal with uses American English. Over 10 years ago I
started to work on the
Hubble Space Telescope data management facility
and my task was to construct a user interface for the 'catalog' of
observations. It looked odd to me, without the final 'ue', but you can
get used to some things. And now I can talk about 'color' quite
comfortably. But I still can't bring
myself to write 'organization' - it still looks wrong! So I figure, hey,
a substantial part of my audience uses British English, so let's keep it
for them.
Aside from regional variations, there is
in fact a lot of very poor
spelling on the Internet and the web (e.g. 'sentance', 'protocal',
'seperate'). What is trully amasing is the very high proportion of
'inversions' their are - i.e. when there are two different words with
almost identical pronunciation - choosing the wrong one. So many of them
occur consistently (I mean, more often than not) that I wonder if it's
deliberate - like saying 'bad' too mean 'good'? Here are some examples:-
A I
to too
are our
site sight
there their
your you're
complement compliment
(A have only seen the first one in the USA).
Of course the question is - does it matter? So what? Perhaps the only
people who are bothered by it are the anal retentives who validate there
sights. Well, the reasons for correct spelling are very similar too those
for HTML validation - if you wander to far from the standard,
eventually someone will not understand you. I would also add some here:
if I'm looking too hire a web designer or authour or editor and you're
pages have speling errers and bad grammer (such as using apostrophe's in
plural's), I'll have 3 reasons too not contact you:
- you're speling errers might get into my sight; and
- you probably can't count either.
Yours Trully,
Ye Olde Britte.
--
Alan Richmond
Be Succinct! (Writing for the Web)
According to Nielsen, the three main guidelines for writing for the
Web are:
- Be succinct: write no more than 50% of the text you would have
used in a hardcopy publication
- Write for scannability: don't require users to read long
continuous blocks of text
- Use hypertext to split up long information into multiple pages
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