Posting and Editing in the FreeBSD Forums II: spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc.

**DutchDaemon** · #1 September 24th, 2010, 22:00

This forum aspires to appeal to serious users, developers, programmers, administrators, hobbyists, and more generally: adults. We prefer that you write as such. This forum is not for children or texting teenagers! Respect your fellow forum members by posting readable messages in a way that people from all countries and all ages can understand.

Remember: poorly written posts with bad spelling, capitalization, and punctuation make it even more difficult for non-English speakers to understand your message! Invest one extra minute to write a readable and understandable post. Note that a lot of people can only read the forums using translation services, and these services do not understand words like "im", "id", "thats", "dont", "cant", "w8", "pls", etcetera!

Opening remark: try not to take any of this personally, even when a moderator sends you to this page. These rules exist to make the forums an enjoyable experience, and to help you make a good impression on other forum members. This will mean they will be more willing to help you. Invest some time in a good post, and fellow forum members will invest some time in helping you. It is that simple.

Pay special attention to basic spelling, grammar, capitalization, punctuation, etcetera. Please, as a minimum, turn on your browser's spell-checking capability, and set it to English (US or UK) and correct any errors when you see them!

New lines/sentences always start with a capital letter. The first person singular, also known as "I", is always written with a capital letter I. No exceptions.

- There's NO space before a question mark (?), an exclamation point (!), a comma (,), a period (.), a colon (:), a semi-colon (;), after an opening parenthesis ((), before a closing parenthesis ()), etcetera.
- There's ONE space after a comma (,), a period (.), a question mark (?), an exclamation point (!), a colon (:) and a semi-colon (;), before an opening parenthesis ((), after a closing parenthesis ()), etcetera. Not two or three, ONE space.

Paragraphs are separated using one empty line. Do not put every single sentence on a new line, though. Posts are not supposed to look like telegrams.

Please.....don't.....write.....like......this..... . - we don't do morse code here.(.....). It gives off the impression .... that you have no idea .... what you're talking about .... or what to do, so it will discourage people from replying .... because they feel their efforts will be lost on you anyway. So unless you want to post a message that looks entirely indecisive and full of unfinished thoughts, the so-called 'ellipsis' should be used very sparingly: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis.

There's plenty of space to write, so proper, full words are allowed! Don't write text messages or tweets! Don't use pointless and needless abbreviations!

For example, it's:

I, not i

I'm, not Im or im

I've, not Ive or ive

and, not &

don't/won't/can't, not dont/wont/cant

doesn't/hasn't/wouldn't, not doesnt/hasnt/wouldnt

want to, not wanna, and going to, not gonna

don't know, not dunno or idk

please, not pls or plz

could, not cud

problem, not prblm or prob

you, not u

through, not thru

though, not tho

before, not b4

with, not w/

without, not w/o

download, not dl

because, not bc, coz, cos, or cause

of course, not ofc

hardware/software, not hw/sw, H/W, S/W

gateway, not gw or GW

firewall, not fw or FW

something, not sth/smth

etcetera ..

When using Internet acronyms, limit yourself to the better known ones and always put them in capitals, so people understand that they have a special meaning. For example: IMHO, IMO, IIRC, BTW, AFAIK, ROFL, LOL.

Do not, under any circumstances, ever use multiple question marks (???) or multiple exclamation marks (!!!) or any combination thereof.

Try not to confuse: it's and its -> "It's Sunday, I see a dog and its boss."
Try not to confuse: there, their and they're -> "There go the neighbours and their dog. They're going on holiday."
Try not to confuse: your and you're -> "Your house is where you're living."
It's always that's, isn't, won't, don't, didn't, wouldn't, hasn't, shouldn't, mustn't, can't, couldn't. Ok?
Try not to confuse: setup (noun!) and set up (verb!) -> "When I set up a server, I will end up with a nice setup." The same goes for backup and back up.

It's FreeBSD, not fbsd, FBSD, freebsd, freeBSD, Freebsd, or any other variation. FreeBSD is likely older than you are, so respect the operating system!
Please use capitals for 'system abbreviations and acronyms' like FTP, SSH, SSL, IRC, IMAP, POP, SMTP, TCP, UDP, ICMP, NAT, WAN, LAN, IDE, RAID, JBOD, ATA, SATA, PATA, SCSI, PCI, PCI-E, CAM, USB, GEOM, GELI, RAM, ROM, SSD, MMX, SSE, CD, DVD, ISO, IP, NIC, DNS, DHCP, CPU, UFS, UFS2, et cetera.
Also use capitals for FreeBSD versions: 8-STABLE, 8-RELEASE, 9-CURRENT, or when used in the shorter form: -RELEASE, -STABLE, -CURRENT, -BETA2, -PRERELEASE1, etcetera.
When talking about RAM or disk size, it's MB and GB, not 'megs', or 'gigs'.
There's a space between a number and a unit, so 10 GB, not 10GB, and 100 Mbps, not 100Mbps.
Please don't behave like a child when referring to Microsoft or Windows. Writing things like Winblows, Winbloats, Micro$oft, Micro$hit, WinDOS, etcetera .. is simply childish! This is a FreeBSD forum. We're the adults in open source land. Ok? So we properly write Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Debian, Ubuntu, MS-DOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, etc. etc.
Even when English is not your first language (it isn't mine either), there's no reason to write ugly posts. So instead of wasting time on apologising for bad English, invest that time in writing a proper post. If you have a choice between learning English and learning FreeBSD: learn English first. It's much more useful in the long run!
Re-read and/or preview your post before you actually post it. Errors and sloppy writing can be very distracting, and they may prevent people from taking your post seriously. That means: no replies, no answers.
When you're typing a post in that little editing box, you don't have to press [enter] when you reach the right-hand side! Just keep on typing. The forums will do the rest. You only need to press [enter] (twice) when you want to start a new paragraph. We certainly do encourage using paragraphs in longer posts. HOWEVER, do not put every sentence in its own paragraph! We don't want to read a forum full of telegrams.
A short remark to (broadly speaking) "Eastern-European" posters: note that the English language makes extensive use of the article, like 'the' and 'a'. Please try to write

Quote:

I looked at the system and found that the network card was no longer sending packets to the gateway

instead of

Quote:

I looked at system and found that network card was no longer sending packets to gateway

Less is not always more.
If you post an unreadable and/or immature message with bad grammar or spelling, dozens of exclamation marks and/or smilies, your posts may be deleted, and you may receive warnings, infractions and even a membership termination.

Some further reading:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-...html#writewell
10 Rules for Writing Numbers and Numerals

See also: Posting and Editing in the FreeBSD Forums I: proper formatting

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