So you have a pet peeve about bad spelling in chat?

I'm fairly laid back about what other people type, and I pretty much never correct them. Like some others here, it irritates the crap out of me when people type stuff like "r u lft". I don't know why it irritates me so much, because I can't really justify it logically, but I really don't like that kind of typing. I refuse to type like that personally even when sending text messages, and I have an old phone where using that sort of shorthand would speed it up considerably.

Sometimes I get it. If you're calling for help in chat and need to be mashing attack keys, spending the extra moments to spell out a correctly spelled/capitalized/punctuated sentence isn't the right priority, especially if you're a poor typist. I think a good example of that kind of thing is calling for help in the BAF prisoner phase when a prisoner is about to get away.

I notice lack of punctuation, but it rarely irritates me as long as it's happening in otherwise mostly correct typing, as context is usually sufficient to piece together the ambiguities that result. Likewise, I notice lack of capitalization, but it rarely irritates me. Mixing lack of capitalization and lack of punctuation starts to irritate me very mildly, but I am mostly inured to it after all these years of online gaming.

However, names that lack capitalization bother me.

If somebody named "fire.bomber" and send me a tell like "cn u oro" I am very likely to ignore them. Admitting it makes me feel it's petty, but it's true. It gives me the impression that the person is lazy, dumb, or both. That may be neither fair nor accurate, but it makes me not want to interact with them.

Edit: Full disclosure - I tend not to put periods on my ending statements in online chat. There's something about doing so that strikes me as too proper. I have concluded that this is partly because chat has another delimiter in the form of the rather obvious <end-of-line> break that ends a chat entry. Therefore, putting a period isn't usually necessary to convey <end-of-statement>. However, that's true only if the statement is the last one on the line. If I put multiple statements on a single chat line, I put periods at the ends of leading ones. Also, periods are the only terminating punctuation I omit this way. For example, I don't end questions without a question mark (except accidentally).

Oh, here's one thing about punctuation - I will never put an ending full stop on a sentence that ends in an emoticon, simply because I treat the emote like a punctuation mark

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I pretty much have the same pet peeves and reactions as the ones UberGuy expressed.

Save for...

I can't help but look down (in the silence of my mind) on people who capitalize first letters of sentences ingame. It just seems somewhat pedantic to me. Most likely tied to the period issue - doing a line break after every sentence, capital letters don't convey any meaningful information, and in this environment, become one extra keystroke to conform to a purposeless rule.

It's mostly just a reflection that we don't read letter by letter, but by words.

I openly discriminate against people who don't even attempt to communicate in basic sentences, and I'm okay with that. Misspellings are not a big deal, we all make them. But a random "u want team" will just get ignored. Not necessarily put -on- my ignore list, but ignored in the general sense.

Regarding the message of the OP, I actually don't find that sentence easy to read, and for a good reason: it's not simply that we read by words, and not letters. Rather, when the word is being formed in the brain, a prediction is made of how the word should appear. When I read the sentence, I "trip" over the misspelled words and have to re-read them because the misspellings don't quite match up with the prediction. It's reasonable to suppose that some people have an easier time with this than others.

I've seen that quoted study for quite some time now, and I'd guess it's based on research that is now quite dated. I'd look it up, but...meh.

"There's villainy ... and then there's supervillainy. The difference is performance."
-Doc_Reverend

Why am I not surprised a spelling thread would invoke Godwin's Law.

Omitting capitalization seems to be totally ubiquitous in the game at this point and I myself do it. Why get in the habit of typing "properly" in a context where rapidity is always going to be valued? You can still use correct spelling and punctuation, if you're feeling florid, as you care to, but going for the shift key on proper nouns is silly when you're trying to type "if it wasnt for my horse i never would have spent that year in college" between parts of your attack chain during a hami raid. At any rate, the content that is transmitted is 98% of the point of communication in the first place so if you really feel the need to become agitated at someone's typography, feel free to excise it via self-flagellation.

In chat, where people may be pressed for time, I'm not a huge stickler for spelling and punctuation.

On the forums, where people have more time to use things like...well...SPELLCHECK to avoid what I affectionately refer to as "C4 word salad", it's irritating.

Reminds me of AOL'er 'leet-speak from 20+ years ago and the slow decline of "the masses" into an iconerate, rather than a literate society.

I try not to comment too much about it. As I've been known to fat-finger posts as well. And overuse of this plaint smacks of spelling-fascism (HEIL WEBSTER!) and other social nastiness.

This doesn't stop it from being irritating all the same.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

It's no effort for me to capitalize and punctuate every sentence, and the fact that I do so has contributed to my typing proficiency. On a good day I can type almost as fast as I can think, so typing correctly allows me to express myself more completely. But this hasn't always been the case. This goes back to the first MMORPG, which came out at the same time I was learning how to type (so I could have better job opportunities). It wasn't easy, but I made myself type correctly because it was good for me. Fortunately that was before MMOs went mainstream, and I was surrounded by early adopters and roleplayers who also liked to spell everything out.

Eventually, it became comfortable. Gradually, my typing speed increased and my error rate decreased. (I had been horrible in those first months.) But in following years in various online games, I never held someone else's typing proficiency against them...and surprisingly, no one has ever held mine against me. People have attributed it to quirkiness at worst, which is why this forum thread seems almost like a caricature: it doesn't match what I've experienced over the past 15 years of MMOs.

Things came full-circle when I subscribed to City of Heroes and landed on the Virtue shard. I'm once again surrounded by players who like to spell everything out. It's good not to feel like the odd man out for typing the way I like to type, so I'm grateful to be there. Edit: I suppose I should add that it would take more effort for me to type in broken Internet "shorthand" than it does for me to keep doing it my way. Some people in this thread ought to realize it's different strokes for different folks. I do play the game with some people whose typing is broken and abbreviated, after 15 years of communicating with fellow gamers, believe me I'm not phased by it. Snobby elitism was never a factor in the circumstances that led to my typing ability. I just wanted to be a good typist.