[WikiEN-l] Arrgh! Please proofread your emails!

[Geoff Burling]

Okay, I'm probably asking to get flamed by writng this, but
would people *please* make an effort to check their spelling
& grammar before they post here? In the haste to contribute to
an ongoing conversation, sometimes the result can be, well,
incoherent, as shown by the quoted passages below.

(I've stripped out the identifying information because my point
is not to target any one person, but to address everyone in general.)

> > VfU has never once seen "any" AfD that decides to delete, nor even
> > "most" VfUs that decide to delete get brought up there. This is a
> > complete straw man argument.
> >
I've spent several minutes trying to parse these sentences, & I'm still
not sure what is being said in the first sentence. Obviously, "VfU"
has not seen "any" items that are somehow related to "AfD", which is
then qualified as "nor even 'most'" of those items. But what are those
implied items? From the context of discussion, it would appear that we
are talking about deleted articles -- yet even if this is the case,
the odd progression from (paraphrasing here) *not any* of these items
to *even most* suggests that the author had in mind some specific
subgroup of these deleted articles.

Then there is a glaring grammatical error. The subject of the verb
"decides" appears to be "AfD", but from the context "AfD" is clearly
the direct object of "has never once seen".

The confusion in this sentence is only compounded by the second one,
where the author describes the situation in the first sentence as a
"complete straw man argument". Here I must ask,"what argument": does
the first sentence describe an actual condition or does it describe
a possible one, & if so who originated this condition?

Maybe I just need more caffeine to understand this -- no one else
seems confused by this paragraph -- but I honestly have no idea what
is being said here.

> Unless you consider the reason for this may a combination of low
> profile and the knowlage amoungst those that do know about it that
> they would be wasteing there time. Any article that is so important
> that it must be included in wikipedia this year is unlikely to get
> wiped out through AFD.
>
I wouldn't say anything about this paragraph, had it not appeared
in the same post, because despite having a college degree in English,
I still manage to misspell words. However, it borders on parody to
find one statement with 3 glaring misspellings follow an incoherent
one. I like to think that the people who post here on a regular
basis are some of the brightest & most articulate (& yours truly)
members of Wikipedia; seeing the above, I have to strongly reconsider
that assumption. Typos & misspellings only undercut the power & logic
of a writer's arguments, which is why I struggle to keep them out
of what I write. (And an old Usenet rule dictates that at least one
of these can be found in my email.)

To repeat myself, if you believe your opinion is important enough to
be put into an email to this list, then it is important enough to
proof-read that email before you send it to this list. I may be wrong
to say this, but any topic will wait a minute or two while you
perform this simple task.

Geoff