Touchy, touchy!
I’m a great admirer of PC-only gaming blog Rock Paper Shotgun. It’s written by a bunch of writers whose work I have always enjoyed reading in print, and I’m happy to see them online. But I had no idea how touchy they were. To wit:
So, if you do feel we’re (or a fellow reader is) contributing to the fall of society by writing “empathy” when it should say “sympathy,” attempts to say so in our comments thread will be deleted. Discuss the content of posts, not the words with which they were made.
For a bunch of professional writers doing their writing in public without a safety net, that’s an odd attitude to have. Man up, gentlemen!
Rossignol:
Actually it’s an entirely pragmatic attitude born out of years of internet publishing experience. If we allow grammar nitpicking then threads become dominated by it, rather than by discussion of our subject. We’re aware that we’ll make mistakes, and also aware that appetite of internet for pointing them out is insatiable.
11 Aug 2008, 06:47Daniel:
Thanks for the response, Jim. I can’t remember the last time I saw any kind of error in RPS anyway, which is why this struck me as odd in the first place.
11 Aug 2008, 10:18