[Dessesaf]

Wow, I just read https://fourmilab.ch/documents/strikeout/ and I'm stunned. I'd really love to see how other people react to this and whether they agree with his, in my opinion extreme, focus on correct use of language. But sadly, I cannot find any online discussions of this article. Are there perhaps other people that take a similar viewpoint that expand a bit more on why they take such a stance?

Practically, striking out texts at first mistake also seems like such a fundamentally unworkable solution to me. The first glaring problem is that he says you can easily spot the kind of mistakes that non-native English speakers are likely to commit. But to me that's obviously ridiculous unless you have a more than passing familiarity with the structure of all common languages of the world. I'm aware that this was written in 2005, but nowadays the chance that a given piece of writing is written by a native English speaker is certainly less than 50%. And the ones who are skilled at writing English will have reached some plateau where they can easily communicate with anyone. But that will be below a native speaker's level, and going beyond that is a massive time investment that has no practical benefit for them. Other than being able to talk to John Walker I suppose.

Other than that, I'm also not sure how you would even define proper English beyond "what I grew up learning". And given he would "strike" frivolous things like "xp" (The windows operating system) instead of "XP", it stood out to me that he used the term "on-line", a spelling we would "strike" nowadays.

And finally, given the brain's ability to seamlessly decipher even extremely scrambled words, I feel like the ability to even spot slight misspellings in text is something you specifically have to train yourself to be able to do. That seems like the most profound waste of time, to train yourself to spot mistakes in text you'd otherwise not even have noticed and that would've never impacted you.