Hi, welcome aboard. My name’s James and I’m a twenty year-old Creative Writing student at the University of Bedfordshire. My politics are moderately left-of-centre on most issues, and I take spelling, punctuation and grammar as seriously as every other aspiring novelist on the planet; ie very seriously indeed, but more on that further down the page.
As you might or might not have gathered from the title, I have an Autistic Spectrum Disorder; Asperger’s Syndrome, in case you were wondering. Without going into the technical details (none of which I’ve ever bothered to look up anyway) it means that my brain is wired slightly different to other people’s. It’s like being left-handed or a sodomite, but I’ll let you rank them in order of respectability for yourselves.
Oh, and I used that last example because I loathe and despire any form of discrimination against anyone for a characteristic over which they have no control, and regard anyone who practices such discrimination as the very scum of the Earth. So there.
Now, before I go on to blogging properly, I’d like to establish a few rules for anyone posting a comment to this site. Here goes:
1. I am a firm believer in freedom of expression, and that it is a fundamental tenet of democracy that all points of view must be heard, however offensive to the majority they may be. However, any comment that I believe was deliberately intended to be hurtful to any section of the human race will result in an immediate ban.
2. Anyone posting with the sole purpose of plugging their own blog or website will be treated as a spammer. By all means include a link, but comments that consist solely of a URL for your own blog (and I’ve seen this happen) are Just Not On. The only exception is if another commenter specifically requests a link.
3. Anyone posting a comment to this blog must use correct spelling, punctuation and grammar. I’m not going to be pedantic or unreasonable about this, but is it really all that hard to put capital letters at the start of sentences and use punctuation properly? Oh, and if you have a specific difficulty with this sort of thing such as dyslexia, please let me know via email; this information will be kept strictly confidential, and merely ensures you won’t get irate emails from me without good cause.
Okay, that about covers everything, I think. Proper blogging will commence in the next 24 hours.
Thanks for your comments on my blog. I understand your Autistic Spectrum Disorder given that my youngest son has Semantic Pragmatic Disorder. Obsession being one of his characteristics too!
Comment by Noddy — January 12, 2007 @ 1:47 pm
What an absolute pleasure to come across a blogger who appreciates correct grammar! I get so annoyed when I read blogs that are written by professional people (so they say) but they either can’t spell correctly (with the exception of Americans/Canadians) & also don’t know the differents between words such as lose & loose. Highly irritating!
I wish you well on your blog & I’ll be checking in on a regular basis.
Comment by Jayne — January 13, 2007 @ 6:50 am