John Random,

If I knew who you were, and if I was the type to offer a shoulder, I would offer you a shoulder to cry on after being smacked down so badly. And by a Christian, no less.

I thought your reply was pretty funny, even if you didn’t mean for it to be, and I thought Redacted’s reply was even funnier.

I’d forward her email to the professor and tell him/her that the student fails at email writing.

E-mail and text messaging has destroyed the next generation’s ability to write and punctuate.

I agree that you should out this idiot.

I have had about the same experience critiquing people’s grammar. For some reason, they are never grateful.

This post and thread are making my year. Hilarious!

Oh! My! Gosh! What! Will! Become! Of! Us!

ps. Christians rock, don’t ya know

This cracked me up, John.

Love it! Love it! Love it!

I’m teaching a Technical Communication course this Fall and will absolutely have to share this with my students. For all this fool knows, you were waiting for someone to accept a writing critique with poise and humility so you could give that person a million dollars! It’s amazing to me how impulsive and reactive our society is becoming. And the perceived anonymity of the internet creates some amazing rudeness I doubt we would have seen without.

I have a very basic phone number and get mis-dialed calls on a regular basis. Occasionally, Verizon actually messes up and directs calls with a similar prefix to my cellphone (my number starts with 223 and the other line starts with 224). I typically let these callers know they’ve reached me by mistake, ask them to wait about 5 minutes and try dialing again. Most call back immediately and then get my voicemail. Occasionally I end up with friendly chats from these calls, but I also occasionally receive angry responses as if it’s MY fault they either dialed wrong or Verizon directed them to me!

Seriously. This “good Christian” should have apologized for bothering you, ignored the advice if unwanted and MOVED ON! At the very least, my mother always said, “If you can’t say something nice…”

You know, on the other hand, maybe he’s terribly young and sensitive about his lack of expertise in writing and the criticism stung. It’s so weird to me that 21 year olds seem like babies nowadays (to me—when I was 17, they were older men.

I suspect comment #12 is a joke, but oh how I hope it isn’t. So awesome if true.

Uh, make that “six months ago”. Also, because my sterling writing habits made a hash of my parenthetical comment, note that I don’t claim to have written “several shelves of books on writing and composition” but that I am someone with (i.e., who owns) “several shelves of books on writing and composition”.

It is a well-established phenomenon over at Language Log that when someone leaps in to authoritative correct someone else [split infinitives are just fine, too], they usually end up committing some error themselves. :-) ..bruce..

This is a scream ARJ! You are the best!

Bruce,

That warms the cockles of my heart as I have long felt that many excellent sentences begin with the word but.

But I think in this case it is good advice. Look at the sentence beginning with and in the initial email and tell me that it is anything other than horrible.

Also, it appears that the rule is a bit more controversial than is let on in the initial article if you begin to read the links.

I seriously doubt the author is a native English speaker, and that is perhaps one of the reasons he or she is so sensitive on the subject.

Bruce,

I’m fine with classifying NIC as a guideline rather than a rule. I’d hate to see it thrown out completely because 90% of the time it is very poor usage, and violations of the guideline are a strong hint that some rewriting needs to be done.

Were I not blocked I would write back and apologize for overstating the rule, though this person would be better off believing that it is a rule.

arj: give us all his/her email address, and let _us_ continue the conversation.

Oh, and let’s all use throw-away Hotmail/Yahoo accounts to do it.

Wrong numbers. Oh boy, there’s a good opportunity to play along for laughs. “Betty? No, she can’t come to the phone right now. She’s ‘tied up’. heh heh. I’ll let her know you called when she’s ‘free’. heh heh.”

bfwebster: I love playing split infinitives with hymn titles. Such as singing hymns in the shower. Have you ever sang I need thee every hour in the shower? Or how about singing Behold a royal army in the shower. And my favorite, to sing families can be together forever in the shower. Of course, it sounds better than it reads. I’m going to have to work that into a talk some day.

I find that among the young today many take criticism, correction or disagreement to be an insult or an expression of hatred. Correct, criticize or disagree with someone, and they ask “Why do you hate me? What did I ever do to you?”

A related matter is that disagreement, or stating your opinion that someone “shouldn’t” say something, is equivalent to denying them (or attempting to deny them) their freedom of speech.

One of my most memorable exchanges with a college student was when I told someone “I’m glad to hear that cooler heads prevailed.” He responded with, in all seriousness, something along the lines of: “I may drink a few beers, and an occasional wine, but I’m not a cooler-head.”

I believe your response was fine, and if the recipient did not appreciate your comments, they could have simply deleted the message and resent the original.
I also think you should have tried to respond to the second email notating the obvious errors. It is plain they did not take your advice to heart!

And I didn’t say anything bad, either!! Nor did I initiate the exchange! It was more like, “I hate you, this is why, and don’t bother responding.”

I’ve only received one email sent to the wrong address, but I’ve sent several. When I was in college, the phone number to our apartment was one digit off from a local pizza place. We always took their order.

you’re a good man, arJ.