Making snap judgements on Squidoo and an offer not to be missed!

How far do you make allowances when you are reading a Squidoo Lens? Do you start to get iriiruated aboiuyrt tyoos? Do you rate a Lens down if the grammar is incorrect? Do you star to ameke judgemants about the lenamasster? Do you assume they are illerirate, lasy and just cant be bothered?

What the heck AJ? Did you forget to run the spell-check on that last paragraph? Have you started consuming Christmas spirit already?

That first paragraph is NORMAL for me, when I type at the 80 words a minute I used to be able to type with accuracy. (This is what I call the “two fingered typing method” – I never did learn to touch typoe. Oops I mean type.) I say used to, because over the last two years I have suffered from co-ordination problems due to Otosclerosis and my typing has deteriorated. I frequently hit the keys next to the one I am aiming for and my normally good spelling gets very scrambled, particularly if I am tired.

The word “contact” will sometimes come out as “conyacy”. I often end my emails with “hugs”, but it has now become a running joke with some of my friends as I end my emails with “higs”!

To combat this, I have had to slow down my typing considerably and carefully check everything I write. My word processing software is set to underline misspelled words in red and everything takes a lot longer.

However, despite being careful, I still have near-misses. Like the time I was sending a note to a lady who is extremely well endowed on her “top deck”. I was about to hit send on the email, when I noticed that instead of writing:

I know how busy you are

I had typed:

I know how busty you are

Oops!

Lizzie has Auditory Processing Disorder (APD)

I can laugh about thgis, correction: I mean this. But it is not funny for my lovely daughter Lizzie, who has dyslexia, combined with Auditory Processing Disorder (APD). APD is a condition that 1 in 10 children have, but many go undiagnosed and as a result many children have learning difficulties, they struggle at school and no one knows why.

We were lucky with Lizzie. She was diagnosed relatively early and her education has not suffered through lack of diagnosis – just lack of help from her elementary school, but that’s a different story. Although Lizzie does struggle with spelling high frequency words and combined with the auditory processing problems (she hears normally, but sometimes the brain does not process what she hears) it can make writing and typing up school work a very frustrating experience.

To give an example: it is very difficult for Lizzie to distinguish between “off” and “of” if she is taking notes or having something dictated to her.

The difference between Lizzie and me is that I can see where I have made a mistake, but Lizzie cannot. Lizzie is a very intelligent child. She is not lazy. But spelling is a problem for her. Spell-checks do not pick up everything and for those people who (for whatever reason) have literacy problems, publishing on Squidoo can be beset with difficutlies – correction: difficulties.

Suffering from Otosclerosis and seeing Lizzie’s problems have made me a lot more aware of the difficulties some people have.

Would you like help with a Lens?

A few months back I wrote an article on Squidlog about making allowances for other Lensmasters on the SquidU Forum, who may have difficulties that we may know nothing about, but now I want to take it a step further and offer some direct help.

It is obvious from the Lenses I see that there’s Lensmasters on Squidoo who struggle with grammar and spelling, either because they have literacy problems or because English is not their first language.

So I am offering to work on ONE lens in the New Year to improve the language, grammar and spelling.

I will copy the text from the Lens, correct language, grammar and spelling and return it to the Lensmaster for them to copy and paste back into the Lens.

There’s conditions:

• I cannot be held liable for anything I may miss
• By copying my work into your lens, you are approving what I have done
• The work will be done by the end of January at a time of my choosing
• It is up to you whether you use all, some or none of my suggestions
• WIP Lenses not considered,  must be published
• You have to be a Lensmaster who is active in the Squidoo Community (I will check your Bio)
• You need to say what the Lens you nominate means to you and why you would like help with it

How do you submit a Lens for review?

Just leave the link to your already published lens and the reasons why you would like help in the comment box at the bottom of this article.

I am also looking for other Lensmasters to make the same offer to review and correct a Lens for another Lensmaster.

How do you offer to help?

Leave the link to your Lensmaster Bio in the comments box here and I will contact you. Of course, contact needs to be enabled on your Bio!

The number of Lenses we can review, will depend solely on the amount of help that is offered, but wouldn’t it be great if we could do say 20 Lenses?

I haven’t got a clue what I will be musing about next week! Perhaps a review of the Squidoo year that has flown by? I’ll just see where the Muse takes me.