Tucson Writers Workshop - Resources For Writers

Douglas Adams (who died May 11, 2001) is responsible for giving us a label for the concept.

Babble Fish: A fish that translates any spoken language into a language that the person possessing the fish can understand.

Example: To understand the Vogons, you'll have to have a babble fish in your ear.

But Wait!

babelfish or babel fish or BabelFish or Babel Fish ???

I'm soooooo confused...

At this point in the thread, we seem to have a consensus on certain issues.

1) Pet Peeves not withstanding, anyone who puts into writing the improperly spelled word or words (aside from obvious typos) is risking their ability to be respected by even the average reader, let alone a peer with professional writing credentials.

2) There is NO excuse for being sloppy. Spell Check is the 'tool-de-jour' and online dictionaries take only a few extra seconds to check if you have a site bookmarked and a fast connection to the internet...which adds some extra qualifiers, but excuses are still not acceptable.

3) Being a perfectionist is NOT a bad thing. Even when making apparently 'off-the-cuff' responses or remarks, proof reading shows that you *care* about keeping your readers on the same page with your line of reasoning. And hey, we ALL make mistakes...so a courteous method of acknowledging it is to post a correction.

4) Yes, proof reading is what separates the invertebrates from the phylums that have spines. Read, Edit, Repeat.

Oh yes, Preview.

PREVIEW...gotta love it!

Now this all pertains to what we do here online and affects our interactions with all of the other people who use so many of these wonderful forums to interact and learn from each other.

In "Meat Space" i.e. the real world...
it's about getting accepted by those who will pay for your work.

Attention to detail is the name of the game.
Mini details. Micro details. Nano details. Pico details?
Granular focus on the sub-details.
I think it's important enough to warrant attention.
Attention to the details...because someone is liable to question you. Or misunderstand you. Or glaze over and you've just lost their attention and/or their ability to focus on the important things that you were saying something about.

OR

You could always claim that you were being inventive, stylish, new-wave or artistic.

If you're lucky you might even get 1 person to appreciate the whimsy of that.

Here's a little something to add to the arrows in your quiver.

Spell Checker

Google's spell checking software automatically looks at your query and checks to see if you are using the most common version of a word's spelling. If it calculates that you're likely to generate more relevant search results with an alternative spelling, it will ask "Did you mean: (more common spelling)?". Clicking on the suggested spelling will launch a Google search for that term. Because Google's spell check is based on occurrences of all words on the Internet, it is able to suggest common spellings for proper nouns (names and places) that might not appear in a standard spell check program or dictionary.

/From: www.google.com/help/features.html