Plea For Tolerance
This is something of a personal plea ...
On PageRanking someone wrote some text which I simply could not parse. My English skills aren't that bad, but they're not perfect, and I often can't cope with even moderate grammar errors. I may be able to generate reasonably good English, but on occasion there are nuances I don't insert, and nuances I didn't intend. I try hard, but I have problems in this area.
I wrote this:
- There might be a good idea in this - the gestalt suggests so, but my English skills aren't up to decyphering it. I strongly recommend the writer reads EricRaymond's piece that suggests any good hacker should learn to write well. Without accurate communication, other skills are often wasted.
- That sounds harsh, but given how much stuff people try to keep up with, if something's hard to read it's likely to be discarded regardless of its merit.
I tried for several minutes to understand what had been written and simply couldn't. I then spent another several minutes trying to help the original author understand that their efforts at communicating were in vain in my case, and perhaps they could improve their explanation.
Someone then appended:
- Your English skills appear to be lacking also. Whilst the grammar of the above was shoddy to say the least, it was quite understandable. Would it have hurt you to have spent the 60 seconds or so required to improve the writing, as I just did, instead of being snotty about it and going to the trouble of finding a reference on a web page?
I freely admit again, as I do above and did at the time, that my English skills are lacking. Other people may be able to gestalt meaning from things that are not grammatically correct - I can't. I couldn't spend 60 seconds improving the writing because I simply didn't know what it meant. I didn't go to the trouble of finding a reference on the web - it's a page I have book-marked because I refer to it often.
Basically, thank you and kudos for re-writing and converting the original into something I could understand. But perhaps you could have done so without making me feel so bad about my own lack of English skills, especially when I really did try.
Perhaps this is an example of where the UtilityOfaMetaChannel would be clear.