This is a technical forum where people interact with each other. Some members speak English natively, but many do not. I would like to take a minute of your time to explain in detail why writing style and grammar matters, and why you should spend the effort to do the best you can.
I am personally not a native English speaker at all, my own native language being
Finnish, so I too have problems with specific facets of English (gendered pronouns, homophones that are not homographs, social subtext); plus my biggest fault is being overly verbose. I write walls of text. Sorry.
- Communication is give and take.
For others to show you courtesy, you need to show courtesy to them first. This means that posts that look like they were carefully constructed, are more likely to get carefully considered responses. If they look like they were thrown out without any interest in followups, they will be ignored.
- Standard structure and grammar helps those not reading/writing/speaking English as their native language understand.
Many of the members participating here read and write a lot of technical English, so it can be surprising that colloquialisms throw them off. For example, in spoken English "to" and "too" sound so similar that native speakers naturally read them similar; not so for non-native readers. Similarly, in written English "then"/"than", "which"/"witch", etc. homophones are not homographs, and mistaking them can severely confuse non-native readers, because to them, you're mixing completely unrelated words. Thus, not caring about your writing style and grammar implies you do not care about non-native English speakers or their responses.
- We discuss technical things here, so precision and clarity is highly appreciated.
Nobody likes doing someone elses work for them, or trying to pull the necessary details needed to help with the problem from a vapid asker who does not have the time to help themselves, much less reciprocate. Precision and clarity is the first step in reciprocating, showing that the asker spent enough effort in asking the question to make it worth answering, plus it makes it much easier for those interested in helping –– both native and non-native English speakers –– to help.
This does not mean that as readers, we should consider the lack of concise, clear style and perfect grammar an indication of anything. Again, non-native English speakers make odd errors, and many technical people have dyslexia and other issues. Fortunately, we don't need
perfect communication to communicate efficiently and in mutually beneficial ways; we only need to do our best.
That means that it is okay to use online translators and large language models (GPT and similar) to help construct your posts. You should ensure the translation or output matches your intent, though. And, because of spammers exploiting them to present themselves as actual users, it is recommended you do not simply copy-paste the machine output into your post, but for example replace the least technical parts with your own words, even if poor English. That way, you show you're spending the effort to interact with others. If you make a typo or grammar error, you can edit your post and fix it. If the misunderstanding is larger, acknowledge it and move on.
This forum is indexed by web search engines, and many readers come here because they found posts using terms related to some problem they are trying to solve. Thus, it is not just your own immediate needs, but also
future-you's needs, that admitting an error, and summarizing the solution you decided to go with in a post serves. If we all do so, we don't need to re-ask questions already discussed, and can simply search for the relevant threads, read them, and learn everything we need. Without admissions of error/misunderstanding and follow-up posts describing whether the solution worked, we all lose; so even if socially a bit awkward, in a technical discussion they are worth their gold.
Opinions are not interesting, because they cannot really be compared against each other, and they tend to change anyway as time progresses. However, the
reasoning and
experience behind the opinions can be evaluated and adapted, so they are quite valuable. Thus, instead of just posting your current opinion, it is better to describe why you have the opinion currently. Also, while it is difficult to accept two opposing opinions at the same time, it is easy and natural to consider one acceptable in some specific situation, and the opposite in a different situation.
Because terms and abbreviations vary across the world, it is important to define the terms and abbreviations you use, to ensure your post is understood the way you intended. For example, CIA does not always refer to an intelligence agency. It may refer to a MOS 6526 or MOS 8520 Complex Interface Adapter IC (as used with the 6502 microprocessor), "Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability" (concept triplet in information security), CAN in automation, or a number of other things including four different international airports. It also means that arguments like what a term exactly means (its definition) are useless, because it is just a matter of convention, and we can agree to one definition in one thread, and a different one in another thread; the important thing is that we all understand the posts the same way.
All of the above could be summarized as simply
"because the important thing here is that the content of the post is understood the way the poster intended, and we are not telepaths". Our interactions with each other are limited by the way we communicate. By striving for minimal error rate, we strive for most mutually beneficial interactions, and maximal long-term gain for everyone. We can tolerate error from those whose results are limited, but an increasing number of those who could but do not feel they need to spend the effort, can easily bring down the quality to where it is no longer mutually beneficial to interact. Consider littering: it is much more difficult to be the first who litters at a clean place, than add to existing litter. Small gestures matter.
Finally, because this is a forum with written text only, it is important to remember that others do not react to your
person, they only react to your
output. And, we can affect our output without any change in our person. Thus, by controlling your output, you can control how others react to you. While this comes back to point 1. above, it also means that you should not take things personally: nobody knows
you, they can only read what you have written. So, if others' reaction to your output feels wrong or annoys you, consider whether there is some small change in your output that could change that. It is easy but unrealistic to demand everyone else change; but even a small change in ones output can drastically change how others react to your posts.
Once again, I apologize for the wall of text. The more important and/or many-sided I think the issue is, the more verbose I get. It is a fault of mine I'm working on. (My secret hope is that this will spur on a discussion as to what are the important key points, and that eventually someone summarizes them in a two-paragraph sticky post, useful for everyone. But don't tell anyone yet; we'll have to just see if that happens.)
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