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From: rcd@opus.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: spell(1) as a pre-posting safety valve
Message-ID: <350@opus.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 28-Jan-86 00:50:27 EST
Article-I.D.: opus.350
Posted: Tue Jan 28 00:50:27 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 30-Jan-86 06:28:17 EST
References: <1048@lsuc.UUCP>
Organization: NBI,Inc, Boulder CO
Lines: 51

> Suggestion for improving quality/cutting quantity of net postings:
> 
> How about we modify Pnews/postnews to run the poster's article
> through spell(1) before accepting it for posting, and putting
> the user back in $EDITOR to make any corrections?

How about we don't.  I already get enough nice-guy blather from our
postnews--the
** REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR MESSAGE **
non-help is only the most obvious nuisance.

Applying spell to netnews has at least the following problems:
	- cautiousness.  If spell doesn't know a word, it must report it
	  as misspelled.
	- limited knowledge of subject areas.  I ran three of my recent
	  postings from net.wines through spell.  It turned up 25 alleged
	  misspellings (excluding article-header items), none of which were
	  actually misspelled.  I don't expect spell to know that `wort' is
	  a word, but I don't want to be punished for its ignorance.
	- ignorance of proper nouns.  Think through the newsgroups we have;
	  do you really want to enter the names of every computer manufac-
	  turer, auto mfr, winery, etc., so that they won't come up as
	  misspelled?
	- ignorance of hyphenation.  You could add a filter to glue hyphena-
	  ted words back together, but now you're piling on complexity.
	- ignorance of colloquial usage.  The evanescent nature of netnews
	  articles is such that colloquial usage like "tho" or "thru" is
	  quite acceptable, tho spell rejects it.

> As well as improving the spelling of postings, this would allow
> a reasonable amount of time for the user to reflect on the posting
> and consider whether it should be sent.  spell(1) is slow
> enough on most systems that all postings would be reconsidered.

Using this logic, we can reduce car traffic by making all traffic lights stay
red both directions for a while--traffic would slow down enough that all
travel would be reconsidered?!  No, your logic here says that requiring a
spell(1) pass will reward only persistence, not correctness!

I try to be careful about spelling in my articles, but frankly I'm a better
speller than spell(1) applied to my usage.  By that I mean that I am less
likely to misspell a word that I use than spell is likely to mis-report a
word.  Simple technique:  I don't use words that I can't spell; this limits
errors to typos and those occcccasional keyboard flakies.

Spelling errors may be painful--but if you check for spelling, how about
checking for grammar and punctuation?  Once you've covered those, all
that's left is to see if the article posted actually says anything useful:-)
-- 
Dick Dunn	{hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd		(303)444-5710 x3086
   ...Worst-case analysis must never begin with "No one will ever want..."