Newsgroups: ukc.followup,ukc.comp.psy Subject: Re: Spelling References: <1261@gos.ukc.ac.uk> Reply-To: mg@ukc.ac.uk (M.W.Guy) Distribution: ukc Organization: Computing Lab, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. Apologies to ukc.comp.psy readers, who will probably only be interested in the latter part of this article. In article <1261@gos.ukc.ac.uk> pda@ukc.ac.uk (Paul Abraham) writes: > ... It may be easy to write an all-singing, all-dancing program, > but there may be other people who wish to use it and can't understand > the documentation. Remember % man -k useage tempory que man: Nothing apropriate. and I once found a message in the mailer's log files, saying: 6/15 10:08:42 local 6579: Unknown action to perform 'distroy' This turned out to be somebody's .maildelivery, which wasn't working because of the spelling error - a raven user as I recall. And there was the time that some mailer was ostracised by all others because it had Recieved: lines instead of Received: lines. > Why isn't there a compulsory first/second/third year course on > communication skills? Even assessed exercises would be better than > nothing. There is. You missed it by one year. No students were interested in it. The people who should be changed most by it don't perceive the problem. >>P.S. This looks a semi-interesting discussion. But so far I've just >> seen flames - have the original articles spread off gos/raven ? > > P.S. Being able to spell is just as interesting, and more useful. :-) Be very careful here. It is a short step from here to "if you cannot spell, your opinion will be ignored". If you are articulate, it is an advantage, but you should be careful of judging the value of an article by its lucidity. I realise that you yourself would not reject less-than-perfect articles out of hand, but you do not seem to allow that some people cannot spell reliably, or even consistently. Not "will not", or "can't be bothered to learn how to", but "cannot". In my car, on the passenger side, there is a large sign saying LEFT so that people who cannot remember right from left can still navigate. This seems to surprise most people. More insidious than failing to take action on a recognised problem is refusing to believe that somebody else may find very difficult that which comes easily to you and me. (Not that *anyone* can turn off the hot tap in the Computing Lab kitchen!) Diversion 1 A story "Imagine you have a flagon of wine before you, and two goblets - one of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns; the other of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble. If wine means anything to you, one hopes you would choose the crystal goblet, because everything about it is calculated to *reveal* rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain." [Reference 1] This analogy was originally drawn about typographical style, in which lack of remarkability is so valuable and oft-neglected. To display ideas clearly, the medium by which they are conveyed must be familiar and unsurprising. This is why journals have very strict rules for the layout of papers presented in them; once your brain has become used to the layout, it can pick out the information far more efficiently, accurately and quickly. Diversion 2 One of the ways in which people divide themselves into two categories is by psychological characteristics. The pertinent example is that of the sharpeners versus the levellers. [Reference 2] Sharpeners detect very acutely ways in which the world differs from what they expect to see. If they are reading a newspaper, and there is a spelling error whose correction is obvious from the context, this will stick out like the proverbial for them. A leveller's cortex filters out such mismatches at a low level; they will literally not see the spelling error. If a leveller were working in a record shop, and a customer asked whether they could look the catalogue number of a record up by its author, the leveller would know what they mean, as well as if they had said "by artist", and go about finding it without giving the customer so much as a funny look. Sharpeners make excellent proof readers (assuming they can get into the Printing Union's Chapter :-( ). Levellers tends to have a view of reality which is more readily adapted by the things they perceive, without their higher-level ideas being pestered by all the error-correction signals. One of the things which makes finding bugs in your own code so difficult is that of psychological "set" [Reference 3]. In essence, this means that you see what you expect to see, partly because your ego's desire for your own code to be correct can be so strong, and partly because you are too familiar with it. You simply do not, cannot see glaring bugs. Diversion 3 [reference 4] Consider the headline "New Discovery Baffles Scientists" in the Sun. Its component ideas are knowledge and lack of knowledge, two contradictory concepts juxtaposed, creating a sensational headline that makes me distrust the content before I have read it. I would take an article bearing a more sober title in the New Scientist, talking of the same discovery, far more seriously. It is worrying that even the typographical style alone would make me prejudge the veracity of an article's content. "I never print listings of programs I am working on on a laserprinter because it looks so beautiful that you assume it is correct." -- C. M. Downey, UKC Return from diversions If you want the things you say to other people to be given the best start in life, check them assiduously. This is easy if you know how to use the program "spell". Grammar requires careful reading, preferably by a friend. This article, like many, was shown to other people before being posted. Some of the guidelines in the file /usr/pub/news are designed to point out how to avoid some of the most common pitfalls. Why does everyone have to make their own mistakes before they learn? It is far better to watch other people and to learn from their mistakes, not because they make more mistakes than you, but because there are more of them than of you! Article construction, like computer system administration, is only visible when it is done badly. The night cleaners, the boiler house staff and many others suffer because they do their job too well for people to realise that it is being done at all. There are lessons for both sides here. Illiterates, you cannot see whether your grammar is crufty. People are not taking you seriously. Lean on friends to help you get it right. Nit-pickers, you increase the Noise to Signal ratio in my news. Use mail. You're blind to the views of people with unrelated problems. Don't let irrelevant errors distract you from the real issues. It is with regret, dear Reader, for I am flattered that you have read my article to the end, that I must inform you, in case you were wondering whether you might be counted in either of the above categories, that you probably fall into both. Martin References [1] Paraphrase from "The Crystal Goblet", Beatrice Ward, quoted in "Typography", Ruari McLean. [2] Psychology, William Barnes-Gutteridge. [3] The Psychology of Computer Programming, Gerald M. Weinberg, p.162 [4] Metamagical Themas, Douglas R. Hofstadter.