[ToucanLoucan]

A work-friend and I were musing in our chat yesterday about a boilerplate support email from Microsoft he received after he filed a ticket, that was simply chock full of spelling and grammar errors, alongside numerous typos (newlines where inappropriate, spaces before punctuation, that sort of thing) and as a joke he fired up his AI (honestly I have no idea what he uses, he gets it from a work account as part of some software so don't ask me) and asked it to write the email with the same basic information and with a given style, and it drafted up an email that was remarkably similar, but with absolutely perfect english.

On that front, at least, I welcome AI to be integrated in businesses. Business communication is fucking abysmal most of the time. It genuinely shocks me how poorly so many people who's job is communication do at communicating, the thing they're supposed to have as their trade.

[jprete]

Grammar, spelling, and punctuation have never been _proof_ of good communication, they were just _correlated_ with it.

Both emails are equally bad from a communication purist viewpoint, it's just that one has the traditional markers of effort and the other does not.

I personally have wondered if I should start systematically favoring bad grammar/punctuation/spelling both in the posts I treat as high quality, and in my own writing. But it's really hard to unlearn habits from childhood.

[riversflow]

I’ve been trying kinda hard to relax on my spelling, grammar and punctuation. For me it’s not just a habit I learned in childhood, but one that was rather strongly reinforced online as a teenager in the era of grammar nazis.

I see it now as the person respecting their own time.

[mewpmewp2]

Yeah, there's this weird stigma about making typos, but in the end writing online is about communication and making yourself understandable. Typos here and there don't make a difference and thinking otherwise seems like some needless "intellectual" superiority competition. Growing up people associate it with intelligence so many times, it's hard to not feel ashamed when making typos.

[ToucanLoucan]

> Growing up people associate it with intelligence so many times, it's hard to not feel ashamed when making typos.

I mean, maybe you should? Like... everything has a spell checker now. The browser I'm typing this comment in, in a textarea input with ZERO features (not a complaint HN, just an observation, simple is good) has a functioning spellcheck that has already flagged for me like 6 errors, most of which I have gone back to correct minus where it's saying textarea isn't a word. Like... grammar is trickier, sure, that's not as widely feature-complete but spelling/typos!? Come on. Come the fuck on. If you can't give enough of a shit to express yourself with proper spelling, why should I give a shit about reading what you apparently cannot be bothered to put the most minor, trivial amount of effort into?

I don't even associate it with intelligence that much, I associate it far more with just... the barest whiff of giving a fuck. And if you don't give a fuck about what you're writing, why should I give a fuck about reading it?

[skydhash]

Same and I'm not even a native English speaker. My comments are probably full of errors, but I always make sure that I pass the default spellcheck. I even have paid for Language Tool as a better spellcheck. It's faster to parse a correct sentence. So that me respecting your time as you probably don't care about my writings as much as I do.

[tokai]

Small typos are much less disrespectful for a reader than an interposed sentence, inside parenthesis, inside an interposed sentence.

[mewpmewp2]

It's the meaning that matters, not the order of characters, words or letters. If the characters and words are in such order that the content is understandable, why should spelling matter? If anything, 2 people with equal amount of time, and a person who doesn't spend time on trivial typos would be able to write more meaningful content within that time.

Of course, if you do have automated systems setup to correct everything, then by any means, use them.

[bluGill]

Not everything has a spell checker. Even when it exists, my dysgraphia means I often cannot come close enough to the correct spelling the spell check can figure out what the right spelling is.

[throwaway29812]

> I personally have wondered if I should start systematically favoring bad grammar/punctuation/spelling both in the posts I treat as high quality

I feel like founders embrace this, slack messages misspelled etc. but communication that is straight to the point

[adamckay]

I can imagine soon - within the next year or so - that business emails will simply be AI talking to AI. Especially with Microsoft pushing their copilot into Office and Outlook.

You'll need to email someone so you'll fire up Outlook with its new Clippy AI and tell it the recipient and write 2 or 3 bullet points of what you want it to include. Your AI will write the email, including the greeting and all the pleasantries ("hope this email finds you well", etc) with a wordy 3 or 4 paragraphs of text, including a healthy amount of business-speak.

Your recipient will then have an email land in their inbox and probably have their AI read the email and automatically summarise those 3 or 4 paragraphs of text into 3 or 4 bullet points that the recipient then sees in their inbox.

[seabass-labrax]

I agree that most business communication is pretty low-quality. But after reading your post with the kind of needlessly fine-tooth comb that is invited by a thread about proper English, I'm wondering how it matters. You yourself made a few mistakes in your post, but not only does it scarcely matter, it would be rude of me to point it out in any other context (all the same, I hope you do not take offence in this case).

Correct grammar and spelling might be reassuring as a matter of professionalism: the business must be serious about its work if it goes to the effort of proofreading, surely? That is, it's a heuristic for legitimacy in the same way as expensive advertisements are, even if completely independent from the actual quality of the product. However, I'm not sure that 100% correct grammar is necessary from a transactional point of view; 90% correct is probably good enough for the vast majority of commerce.

[raxxorraxor]

The windows bluescreen in German has had grammatical errors (maybe it still does in the most recent version of Win10).

Luckily you don't see it very often these days, but I first thought it would be one of those old anti-virus scams. Seems QA is less a focus at Microsoft right now.