Re: Does your reading corrupt your writing?

In message <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 ...

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!

Oh yes, join the club. I know perfectly well when to put the apostrophe, but I'll still often type the wrong it's/its. I've even found myself writing plural's. You're and your also creep in occasionally, and even (horror) their and there.

I _know_ all these. I grew up knowing them and they were so deeply ingrained that when my partner occasionally wrote the wrong 'their/there' I'd jump on the mistake like a demented-harpy/English teacher (which I'm not... either of those things). Now he mostly gets them right and I (maddeningly) sometimes get them wrong.

It's a mixture of muscle memory and tying at speed when I'm not a trained typist.

But even more worrying is that I now sometimes make the same mistakes when I'm writing longhand. Now that's scary!

I can crank out a fair few words per minute when I'm really in the flow, writing-wise, but I'm haphazard and I make lots of mistakes. Some mistakes are misplaced keystrokes, or hitting two keys... but other times my fingers think they know where they are going and they make a kind of recognisable pattern, but words come out as gibberish.

I type festiaval instead of festival (and since I run a festival this is kind of embarrassing).

Or I head for a familiar word and my fingers go one space to the left. So 'the' comes out as 'yjr'.
My question: Does anyone else have this problem and worry that they're
slowly losing it, or am I a freak?
Yes your definitely a gtrsl
:-)
And so am I.
Welcome to the club.

Despite not having written any SF or, in fact, anything with a plot,
in years, I harbor a cherished dream of publishing to F&SF. I
suppose eventually I'll have to eventually put pen to paper if that's
ever going to happen. I have this fantasy that I will write my first
short story since, well, a long time, and it will be brilliant, and
I'll be able to publish it in F&SF.

The only thing stopping you is yourself. If you don't start you'll never finish.

Jacey

--
Jacey Bedford
jacey at artisan hyphen harmony dot com
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: top posting (off-topic)
    ... Wonderful things encouraged by people justifying their lazy writing styles. ... I'm not saying writing must be perfect, and I'm well aware of my own grammar shortcomings and I fully understand typos and mistakes. ... But there are also trends that I run into ALL THE TIME that are simply a case of people not taking a bit of care. ...
    (freebsd-questions)
  • Re: How did you learn your debugging skills?
    ... > I'm writing my quarterly column for Software Test & Performance ... mistakes are generally far between. ... how did you learn the debugging skills you ...
    (comp.programming)
  • Re: Reader feelings management OR rank your chapters OR "pre-crit"
    ... perspectives and in some kind of organizaed way that may lead into a ... Let's keep your idea at you gaining an insight about your writing (whoever ... claim to want to protect new writers from doing mistakes). ... It's kind of the autopilot reaction of the folks here, ...
    (rec.arts.sf.composition)
  • Re: Where to start?
    ... Conrad wasn't a native English speaker, ... I make mistakes, too, and I can bear my level of inaccuracy, but Gwyn often ... does not extend to writing. ... >> correct style for Americans to imitate. ...
    (sci.crypt)
  • Re: If I cant succeed at Linux, then looking out the windows makes me a looser?
    ... We all make mistakes and with usenet you can't run back and edit ... His subsequent post was all corrected. ... >re-read it before posting and it isn't until I've re-read the message again ... >fact my fingers have skipped a couple of words to catch up... ...
    (alt.os.linux.suse)