Marcia - 10:21 pm on Aug 31, 2007 (gmt 0)

Story originally posted in the Washington Post, in a column by Bob Hirschfeld:

The virus is causing something akin to panic throughout corporate America, which has become used to the typos, misspellings, missing words and mangled syntax so acceptable in cyberspace. The CEO of LoseItAll.com, an Internet startup, said the virus has rendered him helpless. "Each time I tried to send one particular e-mail this morning, I got back this error message: 'Your dependent clause preceding your independent clause must be set off by commas, but one must not precede the conjunction.'

[bobsfridge.com...]

Of course we all know better; it should be a semicolon, not a comma. ;)

Now, eight (or is it 8?) years after this first made the rounds in 1999, the issues raised are creating even more havoc, especially in some industries and communications venues that are particularly vulnerable. It seems that a good number of people are learning their grammer and punctuation from each other, including through activities such as reading message boards, where i am sure u r seeing a of it to.

Does it make your teeth hurt, like the sound of a fingernail scraping against a chalkboard? Does anyone really care whether web pages have "correct grammar" or use punctuation correctly? How about commercial websites? How about sentence and paragraph length? How much does it matter on those?

[edited by: Marcia at 10:32 pm (utc) on Aug. 31, 2007]