NetHeads, I made a fairly snide remark about keyboards and periods the other day, and got several comments on it. Most thought it was long overdue, and quite appropriate, but one said I'd been way too hard on the guy, that I must be some kind of frustrated English teacher, and he basically thought I was out of line for "flaming" him.
I understand that some people just can't spell. Engineers are famous for that. But I simply can't believe that there are people who can't grasp the concept capitalizing the first word of a sentence, and putting a period at the end of a sentence. If you can read, surely you can manage these two feats. But I'll take his word for it and offer the following advice for those who didn't learn the basics in second grade: Sentences are groups of words that express a concept. The beginning of each new sentence has a "capital" letter. That means that you hit the "shift" key on your keyboard right before and during striking the key that will be the first word of your sentence, and you'll end up with a large "capital" letter beginning your sentence. The other thing to grasp is that when your concept (sentence) ends, you put a period, or dot (located near the lower right corner of your keyboard). These two visual queues greatly facilitate (help) the reader to understand what it is you're trying to say. However, I suspect that it is not ignorance, but pure laziness and inconsideration that leads to this behavior. The writer is too lazy to bother spending the extra few seconds it takes to capitalize words and end sentences with periods. He saves a few seconds on the message, and then causes four hundred readers to scratch their heads and read the paragraph four times to decipher their code. Often, the reader walks away having no idea what the writer was trying to say, or deciding that whatever it was, it was probably senseless anyway. If you add up all the time that was wasted trying to read these posts, you end up with at least an hour of wasted KR productivity, all so some inconsiderate dolt could save a few seconds pecking out a message. It all boils down to pure inconsideration, in my humble opinion, and ignoring the other "rules" of this list are right up there with it. Some day I'm going to snap, and start throwing people off the list for refusing to delete the previous five posts to which they are replying. Again, pure inconsideration for the other members of the list. I'm not far from giving up here... Mark Langford, Huntsville, AL N56ML "at" hiwaay.net see KR2S project at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford
