Agreed. In some ways there is no longer a justifiable excuse since I've found that Google Chrome and Firefox both have built in spell check features. Even beyond LJ, if a person has a problem with spelling, face up to it and switch browsers. I love that aspect of Google/FF as sometimes it's not so much that I can't spell, but that I type so fast that my fingers muddle up the order of the letters. In other words, spell check also helps cover me when I'm being a crap typist.
I figure I will do a blog post. I've often thought that I should do a rant on tl;dr... after all, when a reader drops out on you before they can even get to the first comma splice, you got an issue.
Is your work poor? Or has twitter/wiki/FB/etc. etc. lead humanity down a path of textbyte dependence. If you can't get the information in 100 characters or less, it's not worth knowing. That's even worse than writing for news, where you had to keep the most salient points confined in the first two or three paragraphs, since the vast majority of readers wouldn't read past the first hundred words or so.
All together, the question becomes who is our audience? What sort of demographics can we actually expect from readers, especially if we are trying to self-promote using blogs and social networking sites? And how much SHOULD the writer cater to the txtspk generation? Are we willing to give up accuracy and length simply to appease minds that are growing far too used to brevity and instant information gratification? Will writing necessarily HAVE to become a mixed media form just to keep the interest of readers? It's a lot to think about.
Re: I'm sooooo guilty of that
I figure I will do a blog post. I've often thought that I should do a rant on tl;dr... after all, when a reader drops out on you before they can even get to the first comma splice, you got an issue.
Is your work poor? Or has twitter/wiki/FB/etc. etc. lead humanity down a path of textbyte dependence. If you can't get the information in 100 characters or less, it's not worth knowing. That's even worse than writing for news, where you had to keep the most salient points confined in the first two or three paragraphs, since the vast majority of readers wouldn't read past the first hundred words or so.
All together, the question becomes who is our audience? What sort of demographics can we actually expect from readers, especially if we are trying to self-promote using blogs and social networking sites? And how much SHOULD the writer cater to the txtspk generation? Are we willing to give up accuracy and length simply to appease minds that are growing far too used to brevity and instant information gratification? Will writing necessarily HAVE to become a mixed media form just to keep the interest of readers? It's a lot to think about.