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knorkertoday at 10:39 AM1 replyview on HN

This reminds me how I've had to tell people to try to type better and nt us wird abbrvs, even if it means they can type it faster. Because if you want 100 people to read it, then every second you waste for the reader is worth you fixing up your message for over a minute.

It's very likely that proper punctuation and capital letters help the reader, then it doesn't matter than not using them is faster to type.

I'm sure we've all gotten that big stream of consciousness email that's a 15 line blob of lower case text, with no punctuation or line breaks.

I don't mean every ephemeral message needs to be perfect, of course. Just, you know, readable.


Replies

latexrtoday at 11:12 AM

> This reminds me how I've had to tell people to try to type better and nt us wird abbrvs, even if it means they can type it faster.

You can also teach those people about text expansion software. macOS and iOS have it natively, though if I’m not mistaken it doesn’t work properly in non-native apps such as Slack. Alternatives like Alfred should work anywhere. That way they can keep using their abbreviations to type faster, but others won’t have to deal with them.

> It's very likely that proper punctuation and capital letters help the reader

Can confirm. Not using proper punctuation and capital letters makes reading less fluid. I’ve stopped caring about posts and comments that do that—if you don’t care enough about what you wrote to do the most basic of courtesies (and sometimes even fighting the auto-capitalisation that’s done for you) then why should anyone else expend the effort?