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Writing your first forum post - A guide

xxNick

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Good evening ladies and gentlemen.

Let me start off with, no, not really. I'm not writing a guide. It would assume the target audience is literate and I have not yet seen evidence that conclusively proves this is true. The actual case here is that this is a rant. I am ranting.

There is a growing problem in the internet community, a language barrier that completely and utterly stops the exchange of ideas and all forms of communication. Even with visual aids, the intent of legible materials composed by literate authors is not being understood by a growing number of users on the internet who, for whatever reason, never learned the importance of basic sentence structure. These people, and I admit that a part of me feels that calling them "people" is generous, might be the biggest contributors to ideas and discussion and very well may end up changing the world someday, as soon as someone develops a translator. Until then, there is a mass of meaningless blocks of text with no subject, no punctuation, most with no descriptors, some with no verb, and all with no understood message whatsoever sitting in my inbox at various sites. I'd prefer not to say which site provides me with the vast majority of this type of correspondence, but rest assured knowing that it is not this one.

I can extrapolate from some of the words that are almost spelled correctly in these messages what the overall meaning of it was, similar to how listening closely to someone speaking an unknown foreign language can sometimes convey a specific meaning just through certain tones, such as "**** off" being nearly universally understood in any language if said correctly. I believe many of these messages are criticisms; I throw those in the trash simply because I cannot take criticism from someone who likely could not physically write their own name with pencil and paper and spell it correctly over half the time. Others are possibly potential contributions to my work. They could be offerings of ideas and concepts, my favorite type of input, and I cannot understand them.

This is a maddening problem. I want these ideas, I want to be able to communicate with these, dare I say, primitive peoples, who are perhaps indigenous to the internet and are yet to master a written language of their own. If it were an actual and proper language, such as English, German, Russian, or even French since it is sometimes considered a language, I would learn it so that I may speak to these people. Unfortunately, it is not a proper language.

It goes both ways. It is quite literally as if we are both speaking a different language trying desperately in vain to communicate with each other. I can't understand what they are saying, and they cannot understand what I am saying. I don't know what I could do to make communication an achievable goal. Does anyone here know how to break down the language barrier I'm facing?
 

Dark Drakan

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I find most people who dont speak English as a first language far easier to communicate with than those that merely speak bad English or use text/internet speak all the time. Cant really communicate with those that simply do not understand what you are talking about, like handing a monkey a Rubik's Cube and expecting them to complete it in front of you.
 

xxNick

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I never thought of that and it's a good point. There are countless people who are actively learning English or other languages to communicate with people who speak, read and write those languages. I can only imagine how shocked and maybe even disappointed they must be when they encounter people who supposedly speak the language they've been learning yet their ability to communicate is maybe just slightly better than Q*Bert's.

I'm not anal about language, I'm not, but the effort wasted trying to communicate with someone that I flatly cannot understand frustrates me quite a bit. I don't mind if they put ??? at the end of sentences that aren't questions, or if they write in shorthand. I can decipher most of it. The point is as long as I can understand what they're trying to say, and they can understand what I'm trying to say, we're successfully communicating. What I have going on now, however, falls short of that in a depressing and drastic way.

like handing a monkey a Rubik's Cube and expecting them to complete it in front of you.

That sounds like a much more achievable goal to be honest. But one of those monkeys will eventually come up with something good, and this is the kicker, knowing that they might have something good in that garble of cryptic sigils tightly packed into a single-paragraphed post is what makes me wish I could slap them until things recognizable as words fall out.

Oh well. Thanks for your reply Drakan. Play more games. It's Wednesday and you haven't played all week.
 

Dark Drakan

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Oh well. Thanks for your reply Drakan. Play more games. It's Wednesday and you haven't played all week.

I have been away for my Stag Weekend (Bachelor weekend for those outside UK I believe) so only just catching up with everything. :lol:

Though if you are referring to my Xfire account linked in my Signature then I havent played anything in about 10 months as my laptop is dying and refuses to play most games now. I did manage to fit in a game of Civilization Revolution yesterday afternoon on my 360 at least, was getting withdrawals from gaming.
 

william black

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I have been away for my Stag Weekend (Bachelor weekend for those outside UK I believe) so only just catching up with everything. :lol: Though if you are referring to my Xfire account linked in my Signature then I havent played anything in about 10 months as my laptop is dying and refuses to play most games now. I did manage to fit in a game of Civilization Revolution yesterday afternoon on my 360 at least, was getting withdrawals from gaming.
 
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