Learn to write “Smarter Than a Fifth Grader (Who Rode the Short Bus to School and Spend Five Years in Fifth Grade Before Being Passed ON)™.”
YW.
A Different “Tact”
Yeh, I’m not going to be tactful here. People who make homophonic mistakes in writing are illiterate. I DGARA whether some “edumacationist” somewhere may call them “functionally literate.” “Edumacationists” are a disease and should be erradicated.
Misused words in writing due to homophonic conflation is simply due to poor literacy. Period. Using sounds or letter combinations that aren’t even words, due to mishearing (and never, apparently, READING) words is an even surer sign, if that’s possible. FarceBook is a particularly “rich” source of both of these sorts of homophonic errors. Most recent (as in, just a couple of minutes ago) example: “intack” (not EVEN a word) for “intact.”
Oh, the post title? I cannot (well, will not) even try to count the number of times I have typed (or thought) “gagamaggot” when I read or heard, “. . .taking a different tact” when “tack” expresses the meaning and “tact” does not.
“Edumacationism” vs. Education
“Gummint” schools are largely “prisons for kids,” but there can be bright spots. . .
Of all the classes I had in high school, two “classes” have proven to be the most _personably_ valuable, long term, and both for similar reasons. I was lost in my first year of algebra, thanks largely to a disaffection stemming from ghastly experiences with ‘new math.” (Before exposure to that abomination of “edumacationist” experimentation, I kinda enjoyed math.) Thankfully, a sophomore year teacher who just loved math and teaching it resurrected a dead enjoyment of math.
And then there was band. I learned more appreciation of music from simply rehearsing and playing the works we were exposed to than in all my college classes combined. I can still hear many of those pieces “between my ears.”
And the math classes and music worked well together in forming logic chains in my head, and those served me well in appreciating and seeing links in language, history, and many other fields. Of course, the fact that I simply ignored classes when they became boring and substituted voracious reading also helped forge those “chains of reason.”
So, “gummint” schools were not a total waste of time. . . as long as I managed to ignore the boring parts. (Example: teachers who taught “from the book” when I had already read through the textbook before the first week passed. Boring.)
Jólabókaflóðið!
As part of my own lil Jólabókaflóðið (“Christmas book flood”), I started an ebook that was supposedly 800+ pp in length. Opened it. Every line is double-spaced. Double that between paragraphs. Does NOT improve the reading experience, just fakes up a 400pp book into a supposed 800+pp. *smh* That doesn’t even count the times I caught the writer padding the word count in the first few pages. Setting aside. Not even written all that well.
Moving on. . .
Ah! The Magic “and” Again!
“Me and a bunch of my friends had rented. . . ” That magic “and” – once again used to make the monumentally stupid “Ugg. *chimp scratches; chows on louse found in armpit* Me had rented. . . ” into something acceptable to idiots.
Yes, Syntax Matters
*sigh* It’s as though some folks have a complete disconnect between their brains and any expression of language. “Every task does not need to be completed” ? “Not every task needs to be completed.” The first is the equivalent of “NO task needs to be completed,” as in none of them, zero, zilch, naught. The second =~= “Only some tasks need to be completed.” People who say/write the first when meaning the second have more than a few screws loose.
No, It Is Not a “Curse Word.”
“Dunning-Krugerand”* Writers FTL**
All kinds of little “gotchas” are traps for Dunning-Krugerand writers. One of my fav gripes is the inability of some to distinguish between uses of “have got” and “have gotten.” If nothing else has emerged in text before “have got,” its typical misuse by Dunning-Krugerand writers in cases where “must” cannot be substituted, for example, is a sure tell.
*Dunning-Krugerand is a term Larry Correia coined to refer to those incompetents who have a massive, undue respect for their own non-existent competence.
**FTL here denotes “For the Loss.”
Pro Tip for Self-Pubs
Actually, this lil tip is not for all self-pubs. This one is just for subliterate Dunning-Krugerand fiction writers with delusions of competence. Here ya go, guys n dolls:
Always be sure that your “brilliant, genius” characters reflect your own brilliance and genius by having them be completely unaware of the significant differences between in/out, come/go, take/bring, number/amount, less/fewer, and be ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN to sprinkle their dialogue with non-words common to the vocabularies of pinheaded morons, like “anyways.”
I hope this helps.
Ditch Your Thesaurus. Read More Books Written by Literate Writers
Third rate (but aren’t they all that, at best, now?) “news” broadcast. “Communications major” (well, apparently *sigh*), blow-dried airhead talking about a storm, particularly a falling tree that “. . .narrowly avoided hitting a family. . .” as though the tree itself had some sort of agency and could of itself AVOID hitting the family, because it wasn’t just wind and gravity, no! The TREE itself could apparently affect its fall and AVOID hitting that po’ family it had previously (apparently) “aimed” itself at. #gagamaggot No, it narrowly missed hitting the family, by chance, but avoidance requires agency (even in passive voice).
But nowadays, since Hivemind audiences are almost all subliterates themselves, who really cares?