Are we all illiterate or is proofreading a forgotten art?

[Guest lurkerspeaks]

It never ceases to amaze me when I read ads on craigslist (and even rentboy). Some of the guys seem to be totally lacking in formal education or at the very least, the ability to proofread. Or are the majority of the ads written and placed while drunk?

When you see an ad full of misspelled words, grammatical errors, and verging on the incomprehensible, does it turn you off, or do you like the "big and dumb" type of guys?

Here is an example of a real CL ad I just came across..

Hey guys I am Stan and What i really need right now is some one who can take me for a nice ride to where ever they want to go... I need to exscape from this place the call home and brought to extacy.. I am down for it all and need it all to.. I Hung and i and make ur dirtyest dreams come true...well if i am kept happy... I need to stay happy but not shelfish... hitg me up and trust me u will be very glad u did.. ..

I am glad he tries to stay happy, but not sure about being shelfish? Does that mean he has crabs?

[Guest EXPAT]

I thought I had good eyesight but now I'm concerned trying to read that Craigslist ad. You really tested me this afternoon. It is a funny read. I doubt this was a spell check issue. I think he is a phonetic speller. . .

[TampaYankee]

Welcome to the very uneven American education system.

I am less concerned about this than I am the faltering proof reading that is exhibited everyday in the internet media, even by 'professional' and 'responsible' outlets. The number of errors is appalling. Only newspapers and professional book publishers seem to maintain high standards and even newspapers have been showing cracks in the patina of late -- a few anyway.

Of course, I excuse my own shortcomings that often appear. I blame it on the fact that I am impatient at reading my own words and I always read what I intended in contrast to what I typed. I can only distinguish the difference when I come back later for a 'cold' read.

[Guest lurkerspeaks]

sorry, I didn't realize that the font size had changed when I posted that ad. I have gone back and revised it to make it easier to read.

Back to the original question, do the illiterate ads turn you on, or are they a turn off?

Feel free to post any similar ads you might cum across.

[Guest epigonos]

I, for one, have never been able to proofread my own writing with much success. I, most often, write my posts first on word and then cut and paste them here. Immediately after posting I reread my post and all too frequently find errors that I then correct by editing the post. Sometimes I don't get around to reading my posts until it is too late to edit and am horrified when I notice the mistakes I have carelessly made. My only excuse is that most of my postings are written in haste and are not intended for publication.

[lookin]

In the age of shorthand texting and auto-correcting software, I don't think spelling is as important as it was in my salad days. Back then, it wasn't as hard to separate the well-educated from the not-so-well-educated, and most folks put some effort into placing in the top half. These days, the standards are much more relaxed and I don't view spelling errors the same way I did then.

That said, thanks to luv2play, I'm reading Smart Aleck by Howard Teichmann, erstwhile English professor at Barnard College, and was rather proud of myself for spotting a spelling error on page 42. Granted, it was merely the use of 'then' instead of 'than' but, still, the book was published by William Morrow & Company, Inc., who should have been able to spring for a good proofreader to cover for any of Teichmann's own oversights.

Apparently, Woollcott himself was no stranger to misspelling when he was a young 'un, yet went on to found the Algonquin Round Table where a goodly share of the early twentieth-century literati rested on their laurels at one time or another. So there's always hope.

On balance, I'd have to say that there are qualities more important to me than an escort's spelling abilities. As long as I can find something that looks like the word 'hung' somewhere in the ad, I'm a happy camper.

[Guest CharliePS]

As one of those anal types (no, not THAT kind of anal), I am constantly having to control my impulse to denigrate anyone whose spelling and punctuation contain niggling errors, because my rational mind knows that, in the great scheme of life, such things are not that important. Besides, I am a lousy typist, so I often discover errors in my own posts. My pride also prevents me from using a spell-check or grammar program--that, and the fact that most programs create ridiculous errors themselves--so I have to proofread everything I write very carefully. Having taken courses from a professional proofreader, I am aware of how hard it is to see one's own errors as opposed to someone else's, and from my background in cognitive psychology, I know that we tend to ignore what we actually see, and perceive what we expect to see, which is why it is possible for us to make sense of almost everything in the quoted CL ad (so we don't assume "I Hung" is a Chinese escort).

All that being said, I still draw conclusions from the quality of the writing in the ad: he is not well-educated, he may be stoned, he wrote the ad on his smartphone, and he probably has large thumbs.

[Guest EXPAT]

To answer your original question, I would not hire someone from that ad in particular. But I would have to evaluate that decision on a case by case basis.

[JKane]

I do realize many escorts post ads via their cell phones but an ad like that does make me much less likely to hire.