My name is William C. Spaulding. I am the author of all of the articles on http://thismatter.com. The purpose of this website is to provide fundamental information about economics, consumer finance, and investments, and to present the information as concisely and as clearly as possible — through examples, illustrations, tables, and other pedagogic aids — for the fastest comprehension. It is not intended as financial, trading, or legal advice, but rather, to provide an overview of how things work and, sometimes, why things work the way they do.
My articles usually have many links to other articles on my site and also to external resources. Links to other articles on my site, such as this one on credit scores, are underlined in blue, or red if visited, and open in the same window. Links to external references are always underlined in green and open in a new window. If they are PDF files, then the link will indicate that when you hover over it, as you can do right now for this example link: http://www.example.com/example.pdf.
My website also has style sheet sections for printing and for viewing on mobile devices. If a page is printed, it will not include any advertising, navigational links, or any other content that would not be useful on the printed page. On screens wider than 1,024 pixels, there is a fixed sidebar with navigational links to major sections of the site and also provides sharing tools, such as for Facebook or Twitter. On smaller screens, the pages have no sidebar so that all of the screen space can be devoted to the article. In this case, the navigational sidebar is located near the bottom of the page.
I continually edit the articles — at least as time permits — to provide more or updated information and to make it clearer, especially when my readers alert me to mistakes or lack of clarity that are bound to occur in writing so many articles. I always appreciate constructive feedback.
Currently, the only advertising that I display are Google ads. I am not interested in affiliate marketing or any other type of advertising at the present time. The Google AdSense program takes only minimal effort to set up and requires very little maintenance, which allows me to focus on writing, which is what I want to do.
I don't do link exchanges. I only link to articles that I think are worthy of the link or that were sources of information for an article. And when I do provide a link, I never ask for one in return, since I expect that other people should only link to my site if they think it is worthy and relevant.
I also never allow anyone else to write articles for my site, especially when the main reason that they want to post the article is to provide links to their site. So don't ask.
Another request that I often receive is to review somebody's website. I usually have a schedule of what I am going to do, and only so much time to do it. Furthermore, I currently do not write reviews of other websites. I do sometimes mention websites, and provide links to them, if I think it is a good site, but I am not going to disrupt my schedule simply to respond to someone's request.
Originally, grammar was the study of how a language was constructed, how the individual words are put together to form meaning. Then, in time, some people have dubbed themselves to be the grammarian police and have asserted that writing must follow the rules of grammar rigorously, and, nowadays, we even have grammar software to ensure that our writing is so constructed. I disagree with maintaining a rigid grammatical structure.
I believe that the main purpose of language is to communicate. If there is a better way to communicate, then it should be done, even if it breaks the rules of grammar. Case in point: writing numbers as actual numbers rather than as words, because numbers can be read much faster when they are written as numbers rather than as words, including the numbers 1 through 10. (The only problem with 1 is that it looks like I, depending on the font family of the letters.) I also often write first as 1st and second as 2nd, and so on. I don't always write ordinal numbers this way, since I have to consider how people will search for certain topics. So in those cases where the ordinal number may be part of popular search terms, I will continue to write it out as a word.
I think language can be improved in many ways to speed comprehension. For instance, using mathematical symbols for some words, such as = for equals. I don't do this on my site because I believe that too many people would probably have a negative opinion of what would probably look awkward to them. However, I believe the awkwardness is only because people are not accustomed to seeing things written that way, but if they were, they would become accustomed to it. But I do believe that people would be able to comprehend written words faster if documents were actually written that way. It might be worthwhile to have some scientists actually measure the differences in comprehension speed between a document that used all words and a document that used a lot of other common symbols.
In fact, I believe that a committee should be formed that should seek ways to improve language in much the same way as the W3.org works to improve HTML and CSS.
I would like to make one suggestion right now. In the English language, there is no word to refer to either male or female in the 3rd person singular. Hence, writers are reduced to saying he or she, his or her, or him or her, or they are forced to alternate between the references to avoid being labeled sexist. Sometimes this is useful when using 2 people in examples, since this removes any ambiguity in pronoun referents, but in most cases, it results in superfluous language. Therefore, I propose the following: e to refer to the 3rd person singular for either sex and er to refer to both the possessive and objective case, as her does for the pronoun she. Maybe this new 3rd person singular should be capitalized as the pronoun I is. In any case, this is just a suggestion.
This is not to say that there are not unintended grammatical errors on this site that do impede comprehension. Although I do run the documents through a grammar checker for a 2nd opinion, even if I don't always follow that opinion, I am sure that errors slip through anyway. Nonetheless, if you want to comment on this, please e-mail me. I would be interested in your opinion. Maybe I should set up a Facebook page for this topic, but, alas, I do not have the time.
At the bottom of every page, including this one, I provide an e-mail link so that if you want to respond to any page or to comment on it, you can do so by e-mailing me. As I have said, I always appreciate constructive feedback. The e-mail address is a forwarding address that will forward all e-mail to my true e-mail address. The reason why I do this is so that I can readily change the e-mail address on the webpages when I start getting spam.
Sometimes people email me with lengthy questions or ask me something that would require a lengthy response for a proper answer. I believe that many of these people are students. Usually, I will not respond to these types of questions, because I don't have the time and because it isn't my duty to do their homework.
I hope you enjoy my site. If you have any comments or suggestions, please email them to me.
Note: I do have a profile at Google, but I don't have much personal information in it, since I value my privacy.
William C. Spaulding