Please don't shout at me!
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2008-03-16 08:29:58 - Graham EllisFrom a forum I moderate:
xxxxx (a new poster) wrote
TALKING OF SHORT FORMED TRAINS DID ANYONE TRAVEL ON THE 17.02 FROM MELKSHAM 12/03/08 JUST A SINGLE 153, I THINK EVERONE GOT ON DONT KNOW WHAT HAPPENED UP THE LINE.
I'm not usually inclined to pull someone up in their first or second post - especially as some people just post a handful of times. But I do find the use of all capitals to be hard to read - as if I'm being shouted at, and I am tempted to ask the writer to modify the posts - or at least to add in lower case where appropriate on future contributions.
It reminds me uncomfortably of a time that I was a moderator on another board and we all (in the moderation team) getting a bit steamed up about the poor typing, use of English and pure stupidity (apparently) of some of the things that came from one particular poster. "Is she real? Is she a troll? Is she a [personal description deleted]?" we asked. And we darned nearly shut her account off. It turned out that she was nearly blind and (I think - it is a long time back) wheelchair bound or nearly so - every byte of her posts were a struggle and once you knew of her background, which she wasn't shouting about / asking sympathy for you understood why some things happened to her.
I'm not suggesting the same will turn out to be the case here - though we could have posts submitted through a very simple device where case-mixing is hard to this day ...
Location, time and date modified to protect the identity of the original poster ...