The spelling police and the only divide between people that actually. matters

Here’s a surreal one for the annals of social media logs. A heated discussion recently broke out in a Facebook group called Blind Penpals about typos and spelling errors in posts and the ethics of calling people out over them.

I joined this group some years ago as a way to support a social media acquaintance from Macedonia who reached out to me. She’s blind and she started this group to get more social interaction in her life. I didn’t feel the need to ask why she was isolated. Blind and visually impaired people are so often dismissed and forgotten (at best) no matter what country they live in.

The group was only a handful of people and she needed numbers to get it going. I had kids with intense needs and jobs and urban homesteading, the works. I didn’t have enough local community acceptance and still don’t, but I have never lacked for online connections and I didn’t really want a penpal. But I have enjoyed the occasional perspective from other blind and visually impaired people around the world.

Image via PIxabay

Thanks to the handful of Eastern Europeans who jumped in and spurred Facebook algorithms to put the group in search results, it now has 7,300 members. It’s an English-speaking group so most of those are people in the English-speaking, privileged West of the world. And thus the discussion about typos and spelling.

As my readers know, I’m a professional writer, but that doesn’t mean I never make spelling mistakes or typos. Part of this is just that I type fast and often have a kid or two yelling at me while I edit my posts. The other part is a consequence of being visually impaired.

First, I rarely read print. It is laborious, painful and slow for me to read even if the print is large. I have read out loud to my kids for eleven years because a parent reading, both the actual warm body and the warm, imperfect voice, have amazing scientifically demonstrated benefits for children, especially children who spent the first months of their lives in cold institutions without these things. But it’s a labor of love. It’s hard and I wouldn’t do it for anything less vital.

For everything else, I listen—to audiobooks, to podcasts, to text-to-speech articles, to audio descriptions of TV shows, even to voiceover on my phone.

As a result, I don’t see words over and over again like most people in today’s world. I don’t have the reinforcement of spelling and didn’t have it as a child. I routinely encounter words I want to include in a blog post that I am pretty sure I have never seen in print before. When I realize this consciously, I look them up.

But a lot of the time I don’t slow down enough to notice and I spell the way I spell. If the word is a homophone, the spellcheck doesn’t even catch it. And at other times my spelling guesses are so far off I can’t find the correct spelling even if I search online. If you’ve been reading my blogs for a while, you’ll know what I mean.

But social media is much worse than blogs. When I blog, I write in relatively quiet moments and I go through and edit at least two or three times on each post. I post only every two weeks, so I have time to do that.

But social media is an ongoing conversation. It IS my social interaction and it is that for a lot of others during the pandemic and for a lot of people with disabilities even when there isn’t a pandemic. It’s like talking to people. I do it while I’m cooking dinner, fielding kids, digging up the garden, taking a five minute break from a translating job or standing in an elevator to the doctor’s office.

I can’t see much at all on the tiny screen of a phone and I use the accessibility settings to the hilt. I dictate nearly everything into my phone and I play back what I wrote, if there’s time. There often isn’t. When you speak into a speech-recognition app, there are going to be mistakes. I’ve gotten pretty good at using the technology. I know how to enunciate to increase my chances, but errors are still going to come up.

All this applies to most of the other blind and visually impaired people in the Blind Penpals group, except many of them learned English as a second language, have less residual sight than I have, have cheaper technology or have less education. Blind people never were very good with spelling and modern speech recognition technology may have made written communication a lot faster and easier for us but it generally increased the level of errors at the same time. I wasn’t the target of the shaming this time because I was one of the better spellers in the group, but the virtual heckling of others really got under my skin.

Last year, I was harried out of the local branch of Extinction Rebellion in no small part because of my error-ridden dictated messages in the group’s coordination system. No one ever said any of my messages were actually incomprehensible, but I had several major coordinating roles and I had to do a lot of messaging back and forth with volunteers.

I want to make clear here that Extinction Rebellion is an awesome movement and most of the volunteers are the best people in the world, who made me a cake to thank me for being their coordinator and were truly appreciative and cared not one iota about typos.

But there were a few people, particularly a coordinator who came from a more privileged background than most in the group, who couldn’t stand my errors or the way my messages sounded like someone speaking, rather than the clipped abbreviations which she preferred. After months of conflict over this issue and being banned from various activities she was overseeing, I left the group entirely to preserve my health and give my family some much needed TLC.

If I’d been younger, feistier and childless I probably would have stayed and fought for inclusion and maybe saved that XR branch from the disintegration that soon followed my exit. But my kids were in crisis, my health was suffering and the attacks were giving me PTSD flashbacks from much worse social ostracism in my childhood. I chose to heal and live to fight another day. But I did take a lot of lessons with me from that experience.

One of them was that even in the best circles, there are people who snap or peck at other people for reasons that A. don’t really matter and B. are beyond the personal control of the person being attacked. It’s the root of racism, ableism and pretty much all other evil as far as I’ve ever seen.

It isn’t the differences that hurt us. It’s the intolerance of difference.

Even in current American politics, it isn’t the fact that people disagree about the best ways to counter a pandemic. It’s the hatred of those who have different opinions that is breaking families, friendships and efforts to protect the vulnerable.

Willful endangerment by hugging people in large gatherings and refusing to wear a mask in crowded places isn’t about an opinion. It’s about denigrating and antagonizing those who have different circumstances and greater concern. On the other side of the political divide, shunning and shaming anyone who asks questions or mentions new information is another manifestation of the “us versus them” paradigm..

I don’t always enter the fray on social media. After I was hounded out of the local Extinction Rebellion group, I took a nine-month break from social media and had a lot fewer arguments in general. But I also became a lot more isolated. So, I’m back now and I pick my battles, but I do choose to occasionally stand up to those pouring shame on someone while they’re down.

The recent spat over typos and spelling errors on Blind Penpals was one such instance. There were several male members with English-sounding names who repeatedly posted about the high level of English grammar and spelling in mistakes in the group. They were from what I could access on their profiles all coming from fairly privileged situations. I don’t know whether they were actually blind and visually impaired as well, but they were westerners, native English speakers, and mostly men. Their style of posting showed that they had a lot of time to devote to social media and they didn’t have a lot of survival-level pressures in their lives.

I posted a brief reply on the first post informing the person offended by the errors that many in the group are non-native English speakers, and because it is a group of blind people, many also use imperfect voice recognition technology. I fully expected that to be the end of the discussion. Instead several others piled on and there were more posts harassing and shaming members whose posts were not perfect.

What I came to in the end of that discussion is worth repeating:

“The issue is not that person A has an opinion and person B has an opinion and they are different. The issue is that person A has an opinion denigrating person B and feels empowered to share it widely and publicly and person B wants to be left alone and not harassed. It is time the world woke up to this thing.

I don’t care if your opinion is different from mine as long as your opinion has no bearing on anyone but yourself. If you are troubled by someone’s imperfect typing or dictating, someone’s skin color, someone’s accent, someone’s religion, someone’s sexual orientation, someone’s gender identity or lack there of, someone’s disability or body shape, go cry into a pillow.

Expressing a negative opinion about other people is pretty much the root of all the evil in the world. There are acts of nature that hurt us, but they aren’t evil. Even Covid is just a life form, living and procreating. Evil comes in when a thinking entity denigrates another, not in defense, but just because the other makes them feel uncomfortable or requires them to exercise patience, tolerance or self-discipline.

The old saying is true after all. There are only two kinds of people in the world. There is one important divide and that is between people who attack others simply for being different, uncomfortable or inconvenient or allow others to do so without challenge and people who defend against such attacks and insist on inclusion. It’s the only divide that actually matters.”

I know typos actually do sometimes cause confusion or real problems. I also know some people really want to learn to use language better. I have spent the past fifteen years teaching writing craft and English as a second language. I spend all day essentially criticizing other people’s grammar or writing and helping them make it better.

But they asked me to do it and I never shame them. I have students who make the same mistake literally hundreds of times. But they are all doing the best they can. Bad grammar or bad spelling is never simply a matter of laziness. It is often a matter of being too stressed, rushing to much, difficulty focusing and all kinds of other things.

The problems that matter are the problems caused denigrating a person or a group of people. In this world, just about everything boils down to that.

The catch is that we aren't all permanently on one side or the other of that divide. I am dismayed when people I respect fall into the trap of shaming others or judging others without having all the information. It is crucial to keep this divide in mind. It doesn’t mean never criticizing. But it does mean paying attention to whether or not the person criticized had a real choice in their situation. And it means regularly checking your own confirmation bias.