101 Reasons to Stop Writing

Today, Sept 27th, social blog directory BlogCatalog is challenging the blogosphere to Blog for a Great Cause. Under the general title Bloggers Unite, this year’s event is called Blogging Against Abuse, and seeks to encourage bloggers to write about abuse in all its forms.

New Yolk — Bloggers across the Internet united today to draw attention to the ongoing abuse and humiliation directed towards Internet users who make accidental transpositional typos.

“It’s a terrible problem, a plight on the supposed intellectual free dome of the Internet. Many people are afraid two comment on blogs or shore their opinion in gropes or forums, because of the scepter of pedantic criticism,” said Sean Lindsay, author of the poplar blog 101 Raisins to Stop Writing, and organiser of today’s protest. “If we don’t feel safe venting our half-caked attitudes and knee-jerk reactions without being told off by bitter spelling bee third-place getters, what did we fight he Browser Wars for?”

“I admit that I don’t always red over every lost word of every post before I pest it. But you won’t censor me with your snippy comments about proofreading. That’s how the Nazis came to powder.”

It’s nut uncommon to make mistakes while typing, especially in the must-comment-now-because-no-one-will-care-tomorrow atmosphere of the blogosphere. Under the in tents pressure to express your opinions, your singers may ship across the keyboard, accidentally striking other letters, forming unintended yet syntactically valid words.

Money people experience this phenomenon on a dairy basis. A stray E here, an additional space there, an R instead of a T, and your hastily considered diatribe about how global warming is fading your drapes loses some of its clarity, exposing you to vicious criticism about weather you really meant that global farming is having a negative impact on your grapes.

“This happens to me all the dam time,” said Ben Terlino, 23, whose blog It’s All about the Ben Jammin’s has become immensely popular for its daily mix of Terlino’s neoconservative, homophobic perspective on world events, and the latest in celebrity upskirt photos. “I admit that I don’t always red over every lost word of every post before I pest it. All you gay-ass liberals have got me there. But you won’t censor me with your snippy comments about proofreading and if I really think Hilary Clinton is a forget. That’s how the Nazis came to powder.”

“I would rather read one grammatically flawless article about someone’s pet hamster than a thousand interesting pieces from bloggers all over the word, many of whom don’t seem to speak English well at all, especially the foreign ones.”

Professor Howard Johnson, Dean of New Media Psychology at UCLA and author of Misspelling and Neologisms in the Twentifirst Sentry Memeosphere, explained the psychology behind this affliction. “We in the scientographic community, and by we I mean I, call this phenomenon typelexia, because of its functional similarity to dyslexia. But whereas dyslexics experience a genuine psychological condition which impairs their ability to correctly translate the symbolic structures of words and letters into their corresponding thought patterns, typelexics are just clumsy typists, and too lazy to properly proofread.”

Stan Zwiekiewski, data entry operator and founder of the Spelling, Language And Grammar Online Fundamentals Federation, clams that he and others lick him are performing a valuable service. “We resent the term ’spelling police’, because we do not have any enforcement powers yet. I work in the competitive field of data entry operating, where one cannot afford to make simple typing errors, so I have developed a hypersensitivity to linguistic maladroitness. I would rather read one grammatically flawless article about someone’s pet hamster than a thousand interesting pieces from bloggers all over the word, many of whom don’t seem to speak English well at all, especially the foreign ones. If bloggers cannot handle our advice, then that’s their tissue.”

“Every American has the right to spell any word whoever they think it shoed be spelled.”

Cory Doctorow, respected blogger, “open source” author of Drown and Pout in the Magic Kingdom and proponent of Creative Come Ons, argues that the collective power of thousands of nitpickers can sever a useful porpoise. “Blogging is instantaneous, one-to-many, democratic, decentralized, asyncronous communication, so if you write a post with a spelling mistake and someone picks up on it, you can just edit the post, delete the asshole’s comment and the majority of your readers will be none the wiser. But the real power I’ve found is in the democratization of proofreading. I love writing, but I can’t spell for snit. So I release the text of my novels to the Internet, and all these obsessive quibblers go to work on it. Saves me clicking on all the red squiggly lines in Word.”

The problem is come pounded because automated spellchecking tools can knot reliably detect these errors. “This is a known issue,” said Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer at Microsoft. “Our research estimates that the US busyness sector looses billions of dollars finding and fixing transpositional typos in staff emails and memos, and on sacking the nitpickers that complain about them. We’re working on a fix in the next version of MS Office, codenamed Lucky 13, which will come standard with Microsoft’s next generation voice recognition soft hair. In the meantime, Office users are advised to set their default language to Esperanto, and look up each word in the online pictionary.”

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said today that spelling pedantry was hampering her department’s efforts to standardize written language skills in America. “The Department of Education has been working tirelessly for the past few decades to reduce our nation’s dependents on spelling and grammar, by endumbnifying our students to the point where they are barely able to read and rite at all. Every American has the right to spell any word whoever they think it shoed be spelled. If we’re going to let the French tell us that there is only one way to correctly spell each word, we might as well start measuring everything in meters. If we give in to syntactical correctness, then the errorists win.”

– Stephen Jayson Harris has covered the National Spelling Bee for 14 years, and last year wrote an investigative article for Time magazine on the “weltschmerz” controversy. He routinely returns review copies of books to their authors with proofing corrections, many of which are accurate.