I was a Freelance Writer before I became a photographer with a cross over period when I did both about equal before photography took over. I'm of the age where we learnt to spell properly with no text language. Younger people's spelling these days is pretty bad on the whole with some exceptions. It's a very good skill to have especially for travel photography when you can do both to cover a story. Not essential as an editor needs to have their input as well but a good skill.

I've read this with interest and yes I see the point, but I wonder if worrying about where that ' should or shouldn't be as opposed to the message being conveyed and the value of that message.

Surely there are more worrying things to take up ones time ?

I'm sure there are William, but this really rankles me when I read websites, bios etc. I think it's just sloppy.

Surely communicating that message effectively means using language effectively. It's not so much the problem of where the apostrophe should or shouldn't go. The problem is, for example, that "your" is a different word from "you're", and it takes that much more effort to figure out what the person who wrote it is talking about.

Fair enough And very good point. Ignore me I have too many other things to worry about Apologies to all.

While I realise that spelling and grammar don't make a shred of difference to whether you're a good photographer, or chef, or plumber, or whatever, I think that if you're going to write anything for the public to read, it's poor form if it isn't done well.

But gee I worry if my children will get as good an education in this regard as I did.

well i think people should proof their words ( I know i dont on here.. i hate typing... lol) but imagine if you wrote on an invoice.. 1000 dollars for 3 hours of pornography...... when you should have written photography!!!!! ........ OOOOOOH that would be a humbdinger!

Absolutely, worries me too, but I sense a swing back towards the fundamentals also

I wonder if that's fair rate....

I was given a job application by a photographer who wrote down that he was known as “Mr Reliable” at his last job – unfortunately, he had spelt Reliable incorrectly….

Other things like that photo of yours that was published on the last pages of Capture (just saw that an hour ago)
Congrats!

Ta I almost missed seeing that myself. Funny I asked them if they wanted to print it again as it won a Gold in the International Aperture Awards and was runner up in the Commercial Category - dont think they will somehow

I don't blame text messaging per say, I think technology in general is the problem. Secondary schooling assessment pieces are very much based on your writing skills. Reports, essays and other written pieces make up a majority of the assignment pieces. However all these written pieces are word processed, and are spell checked by the computer. The high school drafting process allows a teacher to view a draft of your work about a week prior to final submission, the teacher will read your work, give any content advice, and then mark grammatical errors. You would be surprised to see the the quality change between first and final draft. During senior schooling, there is very little testing of basic scentence and paragraph structure. Students simply wait for the teacher to correct their spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors.

Thats my 2 cents, but feel free to disagree with me.

+1

For majority of my assessments we had to do a handwritten draft and weren't allowed to hand up a typed draft.

A typical example - the correct spelling is "per se"
Unfortunately this is one of those mistakes that spell checkers won't pick up because it's a word that is spelt correctly but it's the wrong word. Similarly, we see on this and other boards - light metre instead of light meter, hear instead of here etc. Right sound - wrong word. As a pedant it used to drive me crazy but I'm learning to live with it...... I have to - there's nothing that I can do about it.