Football

[cornerofmadness]

So my university announced today we're reviving our football program (lost in the 50s) and marching band. They're banking on this adding a lot of students and it probably will.

So for my fannish 50 of the week, it's talk about what we 'owe' those reading our stuff. In many ways I think there is just a bare min for this. I'm sticking with fiction as I know very little about creating art. Are we owed characterization? Canon compliance? Plot? eh, you know what not so much. AUs can be fun. While I prefer good characterization there is a place for OOC-ness.

No for me the bare min is how about we spellcheck our stories? I'm not talking the correctly spelled word but the wrong word kind of stuff. I'm talking about the so badly spelled words a simple spellcheck could catch. that said I know a) not everyone has a beta (I haven't in years really) b) English is not everyone's first language and I do not know what spellcheck is like on their computers. c) i wish some fanfic didn't resemble my students' papers, no attempt to spellcheck anything.

Ah well I'm too tired for this.

Comments

[cmk418]

Seconded. Especially in mature/explicit fics. Nothing brings me out of the mood faster than bad spelling.

[cornerofmadness]

agreed (followed by absolutely silly nicknames for bits in the prose. I don't care if the character calls it something stupid)

[ysilme]

There's no excuse for not using a simple spell-checker when writing with a text processing software. All the regular ones, even the free ones, do have all kinds of languages - the only thing you might need doing is switching your document do the other language. I found that out early on as while the English I was taught at school would be called European English today and is more influenced by American than British English, the English I'm aiming for when writing is British, and the default on all text processing softwares is American English. Sometimes you can't change that (looking at you, Scrivener) but even my very early version of STar Office (replaced long since by Open Office) had that options, and all kind of differnet versions of English on top.
But it's also my long-term experience that more often than not, it's not the ESL writers of English who make the most spelling mistaktes, but the native speakers. This has to do in parts with how you're acquiring a language; if you learn it spelling first, as most of us did, it's easier to not make spelling mistakes than if you're learning it in the immersive way a native speaker does. (It took me a long time to understand why so many stories I'd read - published books included! - used phrases like "I would of said" etc. - until I learned that this is a typical mistake a native speaker of American English makes).
Of course, there are lots of ESL speakers who have such a different language construction (?) or grammar that they're prone to leave out articles, for example, or other "filling words" (sorry, I'm not familiar enough with grammar terms to know how what I mean is called).

[cornerofmadness]

Okay good to know so there is literally NO reason not to run spellcheck.

I will say with my ESL students they ARE better than the native speakers (which is just eyerolling)

I know what you mean, many languages (including two I'm studying currently) have the descriptors after the nouns which is of course opposite in English and then you get into gendered language. I can handle that stuff, ditto Britishisms for American characters (as I'm sure they deal with Americanisms for British characters) It's the whole you didn't run spellcheck that annoys me