Only a 7

Grammar and spelling were never my strongest subjects. 

Battling what I put down to a life long struggle to process words in their correct order, mixing my sense of right with left ( which I am told is not dyslexia ) and grammar which I was taught only the barest minimum at the Secondary Modern School I attended in the 50s.

 It would appear my "Random Thoughts" is riddled with grammatical bloomers poor syntax and especially spelling errors which glare through the page quite often. 

This was not a matter of someone being critical because the 'mechanics' of English Grammar and especially the spelling mistakes were an insurmountable barrier to his general enjoyment of the blog but it jarred his deep rooted sense of what he had been taught regarding written English. It relegated the blog as a piece of creative writing down a notch or two. 

I suppose the mental arrangement goes "if he couldn't get 'that' right what else was wrong with the message". It's like a mole on a pretty girls face no matter how hard you try your attention is drawn to it and her beauty diminished. 

Of course it asks the question, should you only be satisfied with perfection. The landscape which is painted by the amateur is not a Turner but it is clearly a landscape. Should our individual effort in something for which we profess no specific skill, other than that it is 'original', meet the standards of the Encyclopaedia Britannica or should we just plough on regardless since it's the message, hidden in the jumble of words, not the words themselves, which is important.

"Make the effort my boy". He is quite right, it is a matter of effort. Colloquial speech which creeps into the written format is ugly, (unless used in a culturally descriptive sense). Similarly when we listen to a strong dialect, the person can mistakenly be taken for being unintelligent when in fact his intelligence is perfectly intact but his communicative skills (outside his cultural area)  make part of what he has to say unintelligible and it becomes unattractive.
I promise to do better, is now attached to every blog but I'm not so sure there won't be many more 'bloomers' in the future.

I can only hope those who do, will keep reading and those who don't, will have missed nothing anyway. (My first grammatical gaff) !!!