Corpora: Style and substance

[Oliver Mason]

> Finally, while my preference in academic discussions is for well connected and
> composed academic prose, if somebody presents an interesting idea in an
> unorthodox manner I will do my best to focus on substance rather than style.

I don't think that anybody here would not listen to people who make the
occasional mistake, and there is surely more tolerance towards non-native
speakers who are disadvantaged by the fact that English is the dominant
language on this list.

However, I do sympathise with Geoffrey in his criticism of deliberate
sloppiness (sounds rather like an oxymoron!).  From quantitative linguistics
we know that there is an interaction between speaker and hearer with respect
to the effort spent: if you pronounce words clearly, or have a neat and
readable handwriting it is more effort for you to produce an utterance, but
less for the recipient to decode it.

While I'm quite happy to spend more effort on reading a 'sloppy' email from
somebody I know, or someone who (as a non-native speaker) evidently puts
effort into a mail written in a foreign language, I am less inclined to do
so in other cases.  Junk mail is a good example of that.  As to this list,
I am writing this message once only, but (hopefully) a large number of people
will read it.  So, any additional effort that I put in by checking the
spelling or syntax benefits a lot of people.  On the other hand, if I save
two minutes by not caring, a hundred times that might be wasted by people
trying to decipher my message.

Good style should always be seen as an expression of effort towards making
it easier for the recipient of the message; this will have to be judged on
an individual basis from what you know or infer from the sender.  If the
sender's name is all you know, that might of course lead you to wrong
conclusions...

Oliver

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