Would a "cleaner" partition of India have been a good thing ?

[joncha]

LIES!!11

[Jaguar]

Truths. In fact, the number of broken links in your sig generally fluctuates between one and two

[joncha]

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by joncha
That is the most moronic thing I've heard in a long time.

Conventions are arbitrary by their very nature. That doesn't make them irrelevant. By convention, we drive on the right-hand side in North America. England has an equally valid convention for driving. Now try using it in the States.

What happens when someone drives on the wrong side of the road? What happens when someone elaborates on existing writing conventions and someone reads them notices the elaboration and sees the same thing in that persons writing over and over? Do you notice a difference in the outcome of these two described examples of not following prevailing conventions? I'll submit that it is diffcult to accomodate someone driving on the wrong side of the road but no problem whatosever to accomodate the observed non standard elaboration on punctuation rules.

My point in the earlier posts (the most moronic thing you've heard in a long time?) was that this particular non standard convention doesn't really inhibit comprehension apart from pissing off people who don't like it. I fail to see how your example illustrates how my point was wrong so you may need to carefully select a more appropriate example to illustrate your point or consider that your point may have been incorrect.

here's an analogy designed to illustrate my take on this. By convention stop signs in the US are red octagonal signs with relflective white lettering and trim. Suppose someone started placing stop signs with an attached spotlight that directly illuminated the sign. This would not follow conventional stop sign design but I daresay it would not make them less effective at filling their intended purpose, even though they would likely annoy a great many people.

[joncha]

No, that would be the case if he bolded his punctuation. For your analogy to hold it would involve moving the stop sign 10 metres away from the side of the road or out in some other random, unexpected spot.

If you think that wouldn't have an impact on reaction time then you really are as moronic as your posts in this thread appear to indicate.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by joncha
No, that would be the case if he bolded his punctuation. For your analogy to hold it would involve moving the stop sign 10 metres away from the side of the road or out in some other random, unexpected spot.

If you think that wouldn't have an impact on reaction time then you really are as moronic as your posts in this thread appear to indicate.

it's more like moving the stop sign away from the trees and bushes and putting it snug against the curb

btw, what pray tell are your criteria for identifying someone as "moronic"? You must mean something specific by continually repeating this.

[joncha]

Bull****. There is absolutely nothing about his posts that makes them easier to read.

Let's review your assertions:

a) aneeshm's posts are easier to read than the posts of others
b) rules for punctuation and sentence layout are irrelevant

I would argue that both fall firmly into the moron category.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by joncha
Bull****. There is absolutely nothing about his posts that makes them easier to read.

Let's review your assertions:

a) aneeshm's posts are easier to read than the posts of others
b) rules for punctuation and sentence layout are irrelevant

I would argue that both fall firmly into the moron category.

With respect to a, I guess i should clarify. I didn't say they were necessarily easier to read I just argued that the style he uses if it had any objective effect at all, might be expected to make the text easier to read. I find that it makes no difference in legibility at all to me.

As to b, yeah I pretty much feel that way unless the particular rule in question serves a functional purpose. My take is a convention is worthless unless it is intrinsically useful, and that getting upset when someone breaks a convention that isn't useful seems less than useless.

Some sentence layout rules are quite helpful however.

[joncha]

All language is arbitrary. There's no objective reason why we use the characters, punctuation or vocabulary that we do. Objectively English should be spelled phonetically. You may expect that doing so would make the text easier to read, too. It doesn't make such an expectation any less wrong, though.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by joncha
All language is arbitrary. There's no objective reason why we use the characters, punctuation or vocabulary that we do. Objectively English should be spelled phonetically. You may expect that doing so would make the text easier to read, too. It doesn't make such an expectation any less wrong, though.

People spell things phonetically in forums all the time and readers seem to adapt quite quickly. It would be annoying but legibility would only suffer if the phonetic spellings were not perfectly logical forcing the reader to guess as to the word that was intended (especially homonyms).

My expectation isn't that it would be possible to make reading easier for everyone by changing the way things are written, rather my expectation is that attempting to force adherence to non useful conventions has no bennefit.

[DaShi]

The problem with putting the punctuation in the middle is that it separates the punctuation from the sentence or word it belongs too. Yes, it's clear it's clear to us that the period for this sentence marks the end of this sentence . But what if the reader didn't know that? The period looks like an error. It looks out of place and alone. A midget surrounded by giants. The poor little period. Neither sentence wants it.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by DaShi
The problem with putting the punctuation in the middle is that it separates the punctuation from the sentence or word it belongs too. Yes, it's clear it's clear to us that the period for this sentence marks the end of this sentence . But what if the reader didn't know that? The period looks like an error. It looks out of place and alone. A midget surrounded by giants. The poor little period. Neither sentence wants it.

To be fair I agree that people teaching English as a second language certainly need to try to make perfectly clear to their students when the students are not using punctuation or grammar or english in general in a way that a native speaker would.

But even though I don't object to the effort of teachers to get the students to punctuate with standard punctuation I'm not sure it really matters if the poor little period looks like an error and doesn't seem to belong to either sentence. It just needs to make sure we can see where one sentence began and the other finished.

[binTravkin]

Lol, thread about punctuation!

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by binTravkin
Lol, thread about punctuation!

mostly my fault I admit. Oh well. It just wouldn't be poly if these things didn't occur.

[binTravkin]

Imagine my confusion when I came here this morning, already preparing a heavy argument in my head, to spit out on sight, and I read the author is gone and there's a duel about punctuation between you and joncha..