Just whilst I am thinking, as it has been on my mind a while, I notice that on this forum, as on many other forums, that it tends to be just literate people who post: people who can spell, can use words to express themselves, who can construct sentences and paragraphs.

There must be people out there, perhaps people reading this and other posts who would like to post but feel embarrassed because it would show that they do not have the skills of literacy.

Well, don't be put off by that, Firstly it is not your fault, indeed more the hero you for having survived and endured with such a life handicap. and i think I can speak for everyone on this site when I say that I/they would not be concerned. They would understand and be pleased you posted, and know that you would soon pick it up, this writing lark.

To help, well there is spelling and the use of the correct words for what you mean, and also the worry about misuse of grammar (the question marks, the commas, etc, but don't worry, your meaning will get through. But more of help is the construction of sentences, and in particular, clauses. CLAUSES. I think they are the most important think in writing. If you can notice in my writing, I use clauses. When you read my writing you probably find it pleasing to read, that it has a pleasant rhythm, that it has a fluidity. Well this is down, mainly, to clauses. That is a good example of a clause in my writing, when I just wrote 'mainly', can you notice that it was separated from the rest of the sentence by commas, and in so doing i created a clause. I was saying that it is nearly always the case but not always the case, so I had to put in that it was 'mainly', I just cut into my sentence with this in order to make my communication correct to how I feel that the most important aspect of writing is clauses. If you go back and read that sentence without the commas it makes less sense than if I use the commas to ask the reader to pause slightly and note that I am saying it is only 'in the main'. Note how i just used those apostrophes to enclose and emphasize 'in the main'. You see as you read and write, just try and think about the sense you are making, or not, and you will find that punctuation is sooooo necessary to make sense. After a while you will get the hang of it.

So post. Folks on here are not dummies. You are in safe hands. They are not out to destroy you, squash you, they are far too wised up to be so low. You wouldn't be marked up for being poor at writing (learning to write), though you'd still get told if you was a knob, I suppose. I get this said to me, but i couldn't give a crap.

So get posting. Start reading and writing with a mind to just what sense exactly the words are making, and then you will be on the right track.