Your wrong!
As I am not native English, I make a lot of mistakes in both my speaking and writing. In writing most of the errors will go into wrong spelling. In speaking probably most of my issues are choosing the wrong words or even not finding a word at all, being left behind with a description of a single word I was looking for. I hope that at least my sentences are build good enough.
Let’s focus for a moment on the writing, as that would be the place where you have the time and opportunity to be right all the way. Surprise: I do not! I don’t have the time to have everything being double checked by a grammar nazi before publishing. And opportunity? Even if my English would be good enough to see my own mistakes, I’d still loose half of my mistakes (see what I did there?).
Your write!
This morning I read a tweet from a Belgian friend. She runs Social Media for an energy company. This was her tweet (translated): “Two weeks in Switzerland and I am making a lot of mistakes in Dutch, French and English. My brain needs more adjustment“ – Although I get the fact that you want to write as good as possible but don’t forget why you are doing it: it is called communication.
Communication in essence is bringing a message from one to another in a common language. The medium could be hand signs, flags, morse beeps or writing and speaking. But the difference between a computer language and human language is that we have the power of interpretation in which we can make up for flaws of the source at the receivers side. My point is: if the message is perceived properly, the communication has succeeded. Message over style!
Get you’re act together!
It would not be the first time I get an email of someone that tells me “your blog is too hard to read at once“. The only people I get this from are native English speakers. You know why? All the others don’t care and won’t even notice it as they are using the same flawed language based on interpretation as I do. I use google translate on a daily base to translate whole Italian blogposts. You know the results of a Google translate, right? I don’t care because the message has been received.
So help a brother/sister out. You as a native English speaker should be proud we are all writing in your language. Imagine the rest of the world and the whole internet would be based on Chinese or Spanish and you were the ones trying to write in those languages. Don’t be a grammar nazi but you could be helpful and just tell us what we could do to write better. At the very least: have respect and be grateful.
Oh and by the way: It’s virtualisation! 😀
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I get your point Hans, the meaning of the message is more important than grammar and spelling. But in my opinion, saying that English isn’t your first language is not an excuse.
I’m not a native English speaker either, and you know what? I think that has made me even more sensitive to spelling and grammar mistakes and using the language correctly. I google things a LOT and use grammar girl’s tips probably a dozen times in a day. And sure I still make mistakes (tons of them!) but when I do, I try to learn from them.
I enjoy reading your blog and appreciate the time you put into sharing your knowledge, but to be honest, I see you make the same mistakes over and over. I think it’s time to stop making excuses and start making an effort.
Let me know how I can help 🙂
Hi Kasia,
Oh I do use spelling and grammar checks. I just can’t bother losing all my energy in editing my thoughts as this is not meant to be a professional blog. Now if I am writing professional work, it should be edited by a copywriter, even if I was native English. I’ve had enough compliments of people I had to work with that my English writing is easier to edit than a lot of native speakers’ writing.
That being said I truly encourage anyone to help me writing better especially if it’s “the same mistakes over and over”. I am not writing bad on purpose you know 😉