Alert: First posting. Please be
tolerant
I’ve always thought that it is much easier to accept
grammatical or
spelling errors on screen than it is on
paper. Conversely,
it is a lot easier to spot errors on paper than it is on-screen.
I’m going to extend this personal view to a more
general experience, and conclude that it is therefore natural for people who
live their lives through screens—
television,
computer,
phone,
PDA— to have less respect for the minutiae of the
English language than
it is for those of us who spent our formative years absorbing information
through printed
media.
Despite twenty years or more of using computers and screens
to write, edit and correct text, I always find more errors when I check a
print-out than when I simply look on screen.
Using a
spellchecker and viewing on-screen is fine for
most forms of
communication: it’s easy to get things 99.9 percent right
that way. If, however, you want to go that little bit further, and get
everything right—or have the errors counted in parts per million—then
you need to make a print-out, and to have it read by three or four people.
Then, of course, you have to make sure that those people
don’t try to change the style, or the meaning, or the words, but that is
a separate issue.