Re: Does your reading corrupt your writing?

In article <slrne8kd8c.4qb.spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Monique Y.
Mudama <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
Hi, all!

I've been lurking for a few days (someone mentioned this group in
rec.pets.cats.anecdotes and I just had to take a peek), and I read that
the best way to start posting is to ask a question/start a conversation,
so, well, here goes ...

Hello and welcome!

I feel like my basic writing skills (grammar, spelling, punctuation)
have suffered. I honestly feel that I reached my peak in terms of these
basic skills in high school, and since then it's been a slow and
embarrassing decline. I find "to" where there should be a "too,"
"it's" in place of "its" -- all sorts of non-fatal but excruciatingly
painful mistakes. I've even found myself typing "you're" instead of
"your" ... ouch!

It happens to me all the time. I sometimes finding myself typing the
wrong homophone, like "their" instead of "there" or "you're" instead of
"your". Also the brain thinking ahead can influence the letter the
fingers actually type. Though I can't think of an actual example off the
top of my head.

I have two theories, both of which blame computers. I didn't have
real access to a computer until college, at which point I started
reading a lot of newsgroups and playing a lot of multiplayer games.

I used to find that the style of the book I was reading sneaked into my
written prose, but I don't think that happens quite so much these days.
Having said that, I have been revising a novel for the past 6 months,
which is less susceptible to influence because I'm working with existing
words. I will have to be more careful again now I've started a new first
draft.

So it's only natural, now that a large part of
my daily reading consists of realtime conversations and ad hoc newsgroup
posts and emails, that my writing reflects the style I encounter the
most.

I do see an element of that, though I actually have a set of
vocabularies for different purposes, eg writing fiction, writing Usenet
or LiveJournal posts, writing teaching handouts, speaking with family,
speaking with colleagues, speaking with local acquaintances.

Theory 2: Body memory affects my typing. Perhaps I type a particular
one of a set of homophones much more frequently, and so my fingers run
off and type the most frequently word without my conscious mind's
consent.

That is the cause of at least some of my typos too. I ended up putting
the word "cousing" into Word's autocorrect because the novel I was
working on at the time had lots of "cousins". The pattern "ing" at the
end of a word must be so ingrained that having typed a word ending in
"in", the fingers just wouldn't stop until they'd added the final "g".
:-)

Helen
--
Helen, Gwynedd, Wales *** http://www.baradel.demon.co.uk

.

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