[robotresearcher]

You got "you're" wrong 4 times in that 5 sentence post. I know it's pedantic, but this stuff is important if you're trying to make a good impression in written communication. Why take a chance on looking slightly careless, when it's easy to get it right?

If you think it doesn't matter, you're wrong.

[rdl]

I just thought about this: pg complained about people with strong accents potentially being at a disadvantage. I've noticed a few other YC founders (and successful sfba founders in general) who have strong accents; they're at a disadvantage, but it's not terminal. (the worst accents compared to overall level of success otherwise are probably Singlish speakers; EE are sometimes thick accents but generally standard vocabulary and grammar, and Indian English is a little bit of vocabulary but mainly pacing and accent, and generally not very far off from SFBA American English after a few months)

What I don't see is a lot of founders who are bad at written communication. Maybe it's self-selection (those who can't write are less likely to try to write online, so I won't see them as frequently, if ever), but it really seems like being good at written English is a requirement for being a successful tech entrepreneur now. "Good at written English" doesn't necessarily mean perfectly idiomatic and grammatical American College English, but clear and persuasive when the reader is fluent in (American, College, Middle/Upper class, Standard) English.

The nice thing is written English is much easier for "tech people" to learn; the best training is reading lots of well-written English, and you need to do that to participate in the technology and startup world anyway. The keys are: 1) having good source material (there's a tipping point, like some sizable non-US English communities -- which is why Singlish is a thing) 2) actually caring.

[sillysaurus2]

Counterexample: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2483053

Replace Drew's intentional lack of capitalization with this "your/you're swap," and you've got the same situation.

It seems like people are just prejudiced, and are so prejudiced that they feel justified in calling people out on a forum under the guise of "helping" them.

Yes, grammar is powerful, but this isn't a situation where it matters. They were expressing empathy. They weren't writing a press release. And we can't seem to find it in ourselves to avoid bikeshedding this thread.

[grey-area]

It seems like people are just prejudiced, and are so prejudiced that they feel justified in calling people out on a forum under the guise of "helping" them.

When learning a language, I love gentle corrections to the many inevitable faults, and wish people would do it more often, because it helps you improve. Perhaps that varies with the person, but please don't interpret them as insults or bikeshedding to reinforce someone's ego, as they very rarely are. Communication is also about authority, tone and style, so just being able to guess what someone meant is not always good enough.

This was just a small note to this person about a repeated mistake which is undermining their credibility. If they take note, their communication will be improved for the rest of their life by not confusing these two homophones.

[rdl]

your/you're isn't unclear (usually).

"how is babby formed" type stuff is what is incomprehensible.

[sillysaurus2]

Actually, you comprehended them just fine. This is why I'm saying people are prejudiced. A prejudice is when people aren't consciously aware of why they're mistaken.

[rdl]

I picked a bad example (which is an example itself of what I'm talking about; it's not specific to the rules of grammar...)

"How is babby formed" is still generally a bad question, marginally worse than "Where do babies come from?", in that it's unclear if the focus is impregnation or gestation, and "babby" could be potentially misinterpreted as "babble".

IMO OP was borderline "bad at written communication" too, at least if the goal was to convey factual details of the situation. It was entertaining, but unclear. Sometimes obscuring key details is the goal, but generally not in technical or business writing.

[sillysaurus2]

It's almost impossible to imagine someone reading their comment and misunderstanding them, unless they were bad at reading English.

The point you're trying to make is based on the mistaken assumption that they were being unclear. They weren't. Nothing was obscured. No one seriously believed that they meant to imply ownership instead of "you are."

They also weren't doing technical or business writing. It was empathy, which is sometimes helpful.

[nbouscal]

The real problem with grammatical errors is that regardless of whether or not the person can understand you, you're decreasing their level of processing fluency. High processing fluency has been shown to be linked with positive affect [1]. This means that by writing with grammatical errors, you are literally making the reader feel less positively about you and what you're saying.

Daniel Kahneman refers to this as "cognitive ease" vs. "cognitive strain". Making your writing correct and easy to read increases cognitive ease, which makes your readers "like what [they] see, believe what [they] hear, trust [their] intuitions and feel that the current situation is comfortably familiar." [2]

Grammar is important for making a good impression as well, but that's really not the key selling point, especially for anyone in business. The key point is that if you want to persuade anyone of anything, whether it's to invest in your startup, to buy your product, or to leave their cushy Google job to work for you, you will be more persuasive if you use proper grammar.

[1] "Effects of Perceptual Fluency on Affective Judgments" http://psy2.ucsd.edu/~pwinkiel/reber-winkielman-schwarz-Flue...

[2] Thinking Fast and Slow

[founder4fun]

One day your getting upvoted for a possible empathetic comment. The next your getting knocked down for slight grammatical errors.

Start-up life keep it coming. I've rode your high and lows and will continue to do so til the end!

[Lucadg]

I agree with robotresearcher. The grammar mistake influenced negatively the way I interpreted your words and my perception of you. It happens at an unconscious level. Without errors I would just get the meaning. With the errors, I see them first and get distracted.

The same happened with the article: too well written to be enjoyable. You could feel the effort in finding clever ways to say simple things.

The fact that you didn't thank him for taking the time to help you, makes me think that for you self improvement is less important than looking smart. As he said, <I'm not knocking you down but trying to help you from making trivial mistakes that change people's perception and distract and detract from the important things> That explains it perfectly.

[robotresearcher]

Honestly, I'm not knocking you down but trying to help you from making trivial mistakes that change people's perception and distract and detract from the important things.

your => you're * 2

rode => ridden

Again, why not get it right, since there's no doubt you can?

[jcc80]

You say you're concerned about perception and trying to help him. Honestly, do you think people perceive someone who makes a typo worse or the person who is repeatedly correcting them on an internet forum worse?

[nbouscal]

It's not a typo, it's a repeated grammatical error. I perceive someone repeatedly correcting someone else's errors as probably having too much time on their hands. I perceive someone repeatedly making grade-school level errors (as covered elsewhere, this is not a common ESL error) as not worth my time to even read. Up to you which of those is worse.

[jcc80]

Was wondering if anyone would correct me for calling it a typo instead of a grammar error since if I wrote "your" instead of "you're" it would have been too obvious. Seriously though, I used to judge people the same way right after undergrad. I was young and thought people who made such errors were stupid. But, over the years I encountered some very successful people that could barely write and had to reflect a bit. "How is guy is a self-made multimillionaire when he can barely write?" I realized that my dismissing of people like that made me feel superior but it wasn't actually a good filter. Obviously you've reached a different conclusion by deciding that people who make grammar errors on internet forums aren't worth your time, so to each his own.

[nbouscal]

There are enough independent correlates of success that any given successful person will almost certainly be missing one of them, if not several. Writing well is one example. That said, it does still correlate to success, and therefore still functions as evidence. There are too many comments on the internet to act as though every one is equally worth reading. It makes more sense to do a quick Bayesian update on the available evidence and move on to a comment that is more likely to be valuable. This isn't a value judgment about the person who made the comment, it's just pragmatism.

[tripzilch]

I'm not going to correct your spelling, but you might want to check your attitude.

[Varcht]

Does it really matter? Forum posts are stream of consciousness, more often than not typed on our phones and posted with at most a quick reread. For me the content is several orders of magnitude more important than spelling. Personally I find myself discounting more those that find the need to trifle over spelling much like I discount those that never dare to risk but choose to profit by critiquing in hindsight. Spelling might matter when trying to please the establishments but it's the underlying thoughts however spelt that matter.

[robotresearcher]

It doesn't matter all that much. Looking back at why I was motivated to offer a tip, I think when the poster pleaded "why did they treat us like garbage?" I wondered if his/her written communication could be contributing to that.

This:

> "it's the underlying thoughts however spelt that matter."

is not true. You didn't write your post in txtspk because that is not the locally acceptable way of communicating. It could be comprehensible, unambiguous and require less typing, but it just doesn't meet the tacitly agreed standards in this community and you would not expect your ideas to have the impact they deserve if you chose to write that way.

[nemothekid]

You ever thought that everyone on HN might not be American or speak english as a first language? Its a comment on an internet forum, there is no need for the active grammar schooling. Your trivial, holier-than-thou, grammer nazi bullshit actively discourage other posters who may not speak english fluently from posting. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7233681

[halter73]

While I agree that correcting grammar isn't usually that productive, I think that mixing up "your" and "you're" is probably indicative of a native English speaker.

I doubt that "your" and "you're" are homophones in most other languages. As a native English speaker myself, I often slip up and write "your" when I mean "you're" because they both sound the same in my head and it's quicker to type "your".

I think that a non-native speaker would be less like to make this mistake, because it requires the writer to decide to contract the pronoun and the verb and then forget to use an apostrophe.

I think this is far more likely to happen if you're simply typing out a stream of consciousness than if you're translating your thoughts from a different language.

[ludwigvan]

Yes, as a non-native, I agree that it is not very common (almost never) for me to mix them up because I prononunce them differently.

Another reason non-natives don't do this mistake might be that usually they are thought the written language first, so schools concentrate on grammatical issues more.

[imarg]

Adding another datapoint, as a non-native speaker myself, I believe I've rarely (if ever) mixed them up.

As the parent commenter said, I've also noticed in the past that this mix up occurs usually among native English speakers. I've noticed it with other languages too, that native speakers often mix up homophones, probably because as a native speaker you write as you would speak and either you don't care or don't even think about it.

[nzp]

As a non-native speaker I agree with this. But I've noticed something interesting: before I was aware that mixing up the two was common with native speakers it would never happen in my own writing, but once I realized people do make this mistake I became susceptible to making it too. I still don't, but now I sometimes have to make a conscious effort to differentiate the two. It's amazing where social learning can show it's effects. (And BTW, I think I would just kill myself if I ever mixed up affect and effect, I see that a lot, and for some reason it annoys the hell out of me.)

[olegoandreev]

I hope you do realize that the errors are much harder to interpret for the non-native speakers? Where the native speaker understands, that the writer simply mixed up two words, the non-native speaker wastes a lot of time trying to parse the sentence without correcting the error. I've seen it happen many times with my colleagues.

[halter73]

Thanks for pointing this out.

It may seem obvious, but I never before considered how the simple grammatical mistakes I frequently make disproportionately hinder the ability of non-native speakers to efficiently comprehend my posts.

Your comment has given me an extra incentive to carefully proofread my future HN comments before posting.

[robotresearcher]

OK, sure. I get it. I think this is a place to offer ideas great and small that might give each other a hand. If this kind of tip is not appropriate, I certainly don't need to chip in.

I agree with the other comment that this thread is toxic. I didn't intend that. I guess I learned a lesson.

[sizzle]

tactfully stated, HN is awesome.

[derrida]

HN is awesome. Democracy is fair. Jesus Christ is Lord. Praise be to Allah. Human rights are essential.

The functioning of ideology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology

Silicon Valley has its own ideology, and HN is the center of it. Any statement of "...is awesome" is a good candidate for finding the foundations of this ideology. Any good ideology has to encompass a diversity of views to survive. In this case, we see the public prostration of the spat out soul who voluntarily subjects their weakness to the crowd in the name of self-development. Addressing whether this is a good or bad thing would be to enter into the terms of which this particular ideology functions.

Most ideologies typically benefit a certain class of people: clergy, politicians, a bureaucracy, academia, venture capital.

[derefr]

That wasn't a statement of ideology; it was rather more a concise way to say "you reminded me why I come here instead of somewhere else: it is, on average, composed of people like you, and I enjoy the atmosphere this creates. Thank you for being you, and for contributing to making this the kind of place I enjoy."

When you see "community X is awesome" posted within community X, it's mostly a recent convert looking back and realizing that wherever they just came from was a comparatively bad fit for their personality and views.

I hear it a lot, here, from hackers switching from /r/programming to HN. I hear it on LessWrong from people who came from, for example, the atheist community, or the skeptic community, and didn't realize it was possible to talk about those subjects without constant dick-waving and chest-beating regarding their respective out-groups.

Either way, it's almost the opposite reaction to what you're accusing it of being: it's not like joining a cult; it's more like leaving high-school and realizing you can make friends with people because they talk about things you like, and behave in ways that don't annoy you, instead of just putting up with them because they're constantly forced to be around you for six hours a day.

[sizzle]

That is precisely the sentiment revealed by my comment, from being a long time lurker from reddit and finally switching over to HN full-time. The novelty of widespread intelligent discourse will wear off soon enough the more I participate.

[sillysaurus2]

This comment thread is toxic, and it's regrettable that you created it. Look at the replies you've engendered. Quibbling over grammar is not why most people read HN.

Drew Houston writes without capitalization. Would you say the same to him? Ideas are what matter, not apostrophes.

[robotresearcher]

I agree, and I wish I hadn't.

On your second point, I think there's a clear difference between consistent lack of capitalization that is obviously a stylistic quirk, and simply using a homophone because you don't know (or, I guess as it turns out, don't care) that you're doing so. This is a common mistake and not usually due to ESL/EAL.

But I won't do it again, as it evidently is not a net good in this medium. Sorry, folks.

[gruseom]

"Not a net good in this medium" is exactly the right way to look at this. In a more robust environment, your (IMO) true and well-intentioned original comment would not have been a problem.

[znowi]

What makes this thread toxic, if you read closely, is your fierce defense of bad grammar all over it.

[nzp]

Apostrophes, proper capitalization, punctuation, properly dividing text into paragraphs... all these orthographic conventions are essential to communicating ideas. So if ideas matter, apostrophes matter too. Capitalization even more so, no matter who the person is.

[nknighthb]

> Drew Houston writes without capitalization.

Thank you for informing me. Now that I know this, I'll look more seriously at Dropbox alternatives. This degree of carelessness and disrespect for others is dangerous in the CEO of a company asking me to trust them with my data.