curi comments on reply to benelliott about Popper issues - Less Wrong

-1 Post author: curi 07 April 2011 08:11AM

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Comment author: jimrandomh 08 April 2011 06:50:26PM 1 point [-]

Following the rules of English is solely the writer's responsibility. Some text input methods, such as onscreen keyboards for cell phones, will do capitalization for you. They will sometimes get it wrong, though, so you have to override them, and this is inconvenient enough that people who're used to using the shift key don't want autocapitalization. For example, variable names stay in lower-case if they're at the start of a sentence, and some periods represent abbreviations rather than the ends of sentences.

More to the point, though, proper capitalization, punctuation, spelling and grammar are signals that reveal how fluent a writer is in English, and whether they've proofread. Comments that don't follow the basic rules of English can be dismissed more readily, because writers still struggling with language are usually struggling with concepts too, and a comment that hasn't been proofread probably hasn't been checked for logical errors either.