![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spelling etiquette
Nov. 13th, 2005 11:07 amThe question has been asked: should you correct obvious typos when quoting someone else's online posting in your own?
If it's just a minor typo, I do that. It makes me itch to leave it uncorrected. Grammatical errors and such, except for punctuation typos, no.
It helps that quoting online is usually cut-and-paste. If I had to retype it all, I'd find it harder to leave it alone.
This came up for me once before. In my college days, when computers were either behemoths in the basement of the math building or the Pong machine in the dorm lobby, and some students still had manual typewriters and others had none at all and couldn't type, I earned a little extra money typing my fellow students' papers. And I faced a dilemma with spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors. They were numerous, and it seemed to be a particular problem for non-typists. The only perfectly written paper I ever typed for someone else was by a student whose typewriter was in the shop. I couldn't stand to leave the errors unfixed, yet if I fixed them I was denying the authors the opportunity to learn which is what they were writing the papers for in the first place.
I tried to compromise by fixing the errors and discussing them with my clients. But the clients didn't want to listen; they wanted to grab the finished paper and run off to class. After a few cases of this I reached the only remaining solution I was comfortable with: I stopped typing other people's papers.
If it's just a minor typo, I do that. It makes me itch to leave it uncorrected. Grammatical errors and such, except for punctuation typos, no.
It helps that quoting online is usually cut-and-paste. If I had to retype it all, I'd find it harder to leave it alone.
This came up for me once before. In my college days, when computers were either behemoths in the basement of the math building or the Pong machine in the dorm lobby, and some students still had manual typewriters and others had none at all and couldn't type, I earned a little extra money typing my fellow students' papers. And I faced a dilemma with spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors. They were numerous, and it seemed to be a particular problem for non-typists. The only perfectly written paper I ever typed for someone else was by a student whose typewriter was in the shop. I couldn't stand to leave the errors unfixed, yet if I fixed them I was denying the authors the opportunity to learn which is what they were writing the papers for in the first place.
I tried to compromise by fixing the errors and discussing them with my clients. But the clients didn't want to listen; they wanted to grab the finished paper and run off to class. After a few cases of this I reached the only remaining solution I was comfortable with: I stopped typing other people's papers.
