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Saturday, December 15, 2007

editng poorley ritten posts

Over the years I've checked and approved a lot of posts to my Enid Blyton site, something like 2166 messages including those in the Talk About Blyton section (which was once Blyton Bloopers). All messages are held in a pending status until I've read and approved them. This is partly because of spam (although I seem to have cracked that problem and rarely get spam anymore) but mostly because I feel a need to "tidy up" and edit many posts before I display them on the website.

Once in a while I get a small deluge of posts by one person that seem to have been written in a great hurry. This is one I did approve, unedited, if only to explain why I'd deleted some of the others:

"why are u not posting my messages, EnidBlyton. net?They have clean language and aren't bad in taste. Please post them. I write in talk about Blyton."

There are various reasons that I might delete posts. Anything written entirely in lowercase (or worse, in capitals) is going straight in the trash. Anything written in that terrible instant message lingo such as "i luv enid blyton she is gr8" is gng str8 in da bin 2. Those are the kinds of messages that I'll delete without a second glance. Wrong or right, sourpuss or not, I'm not having my site degenerate into pages of ugly, hard-to-read nonsense. I visit a lot of forums during the course of my work as a website designer, seeking a solution to one programming problem or another, and I usually find myself wading through pages of techno-babble written in some grotesque form of English that astounds me. Admittedly what's being said is more important than the way it's being said, but still, I always come away shuddering. Mr Pemberton-Oakes of Linbury Court Preparatory School would be appalled at such an abuse of the English language.

You might expect below-par grammar and off-kilter punctuation from young children who are still learning. You'd certainly expect oddly-formed grammar from "foreigners" (although I have nothing but admiration for those who can read, write and speak in any second language). But I don't have much patience for English-speaking adults who can't cobble together a few carefully-constructed sentences with capital letters in the right places and full stops (periods) at the end. I mean, really, is that too much to ask?

i read enid blyton when i was a child and want to buy allthe beooks for my own children,can you tellme where to buy some please

This makes me want to write back to this adult and say, "Look, clearly you're a busy person and haven't got time to write in a grown-up manner. Obviously there are more pressing matters in your life to worry about. That's fine. And even though you had time to dash off this quick post, obviously you didn't have that extra two seconds available to bother glancing at all the Enid Blyton book links that I have plastered about the page. That's fine too, I guess. But please don't expect me to take the time to edit your message and post it, and then respond to you." There's the problem, you see — this is what I'd like to say, but it would take too long. Deleting the post is much easier.

In the case of the young poster above who asked why I'd deleted his or her posts, I had in fact taken the time to email and say that I was going to delete a few on the grounds that the messages were written in lowercase with not a punctuation mark in sight. Apparently the poster didn't get my email, for some reason. Wrong email address? Flagged as spam? Or simply ignored? Who knows. Anyway, I had started to edit one of the messages and then thought, "This is crazy. I just can't get sucked into this. If I do, I'll be giving in and then I'll be editing every post that comes in." I've had this dilemma many times before. I don't want to delete anything, and I appreciate ALL the comments and messages that come in... but I also have a certain standard I'd like to maintain, for my own personal reasons as well as keeping the site "readable" to others.

Occasionally I will edit a poorly-written post just because the content is so good. Other times I'll leave it in "pending" status and contact the person who wrote it, and ask them to correct it. The first time I did this I expected the person to say, "What? How ungrateful! You can forget it, buster — and I won't be back!" I risked alienating the person, and I didn't want that, so I worded my email as carefully as possible. But there's no polite way to say "Please write properly" so I just said it and waited for a response. To my surprise it was a favorable response like "Sorry about that, I'll do better next time!"... and that person went on to post numerous nicely written messages, and still posts regularly today. That was nice, and it made me "less afraid" to stand my ground. It's really very rare that I send an email like that, but so far, so good. I've come to the conclusion that if someone takes offense and doesn't write again... well, it's a shame, but I'll not lose any sleep over it.

There are occasional posts that are written well, in the sense that there's nothing grammatically wrong, but are deleted for a different reason — like this fairly common message by Anonymous:

I think Enid Blyton is great.

Okaaaaaay then. A message like this from someone who doesn't even leave a name is pretty much worthless to the website and anyone that visits. Oddly enough, I receive very few messages saying negative things like "I think Enid Blyton sucks!" — obviously I wouldn't approve a pointless message like that, but I would approve messages that had something interesting to say, good or bad. Actually I'm more likely to get a negative comment about me or the site, than the author herself.

I'm not after perfection. If I was, I'd have to delete a whole load of my own posts! It's hard to define in words exactly what kind of "standard" I'm looking for; I've been doing this for so long now that I just have a feel for what's acceptable to me and what's not. Thankfully I'm able to approve about 90% of posts. Included in those that are deleted are occasional spam messages, and the rest are those that seem "pointless" (like the one above) or those that I can't bring myself to edit. Those I do edit usually include the odd typo here and there, or a missing capital letter. I make a point not to touch them at all unless I feel I really "have" to.

And once in a while there's a perfectly constructed message that has one galring error — like the word "glaring" that I just typed wrong. We all make mistakes, right? So I go ahead and fix it to avoid having that person email me and say, "Oops, I just spotted an error in my post, but I can't correct it — can you do it for me?"

This was a post about posts. If anyone comments, then this post will contain posts about a post about posts! :-)

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