Just how important are grammar and spelling? [closed]

A blog post of mine made it on the Hacker News front page. My blog post was mainly intended for a very, very small audience, but ended up getting around 20,000 views in one day. The most talked about topic in the comments was that I accidentally used:

"it's self" instead of "itself"

It was an honest mistake, and it didn't make the article unreadable.

I got comments like "mistakes like this are inexcusable" and "Once I read 'it's self' I stopped reading" and the harshest "why should we read your post if you can't take the time to proof it?" (although, I never asked anyone to read it, someone posted it on there)

My question is, just how important IS grammar and spelling.

For example:

"Altho im spelling this wrongly and im not using commas or apostrophes your still able to read this fine and completely understand itall."

And for words like "there", "they're" and "their", I know they have different meanings, but why does it matter if we have proof heteronyms work just fine?

I can't remember which writer I got this from (William Zinsser?), but: you, as a writer, must remove from the reader's view every distraction in your writing that you can.

You are taking your reader on a difficult trip, one in which you want their attention in a certain way, on a certain point, at a certain time, and nowhere else. The average human brain while reading is always, always, always, looking for something else to focus on. Odd bird calls, plastic bags wafting over the river, pixels shifting in the email window. We are an event-driven, interrupt-oriented people, and there are potential intrusions in every minute of every day.

When we read, we rely on the writer to help us tune those things out. Now, I know perfectly well this medium and the pace of new content it demands makes timely, spot-free writing almost impossible. Clear, clean, focus-riveting content takes time and careful editing, and even still, multiple passes to clear out the artifacts of hasty editing.

You see what happens otherwise. The good news is it's not printed in a way you can't address after release. Fix the error, thank readers for pointing it out, and move on.

Note also the effect of a typo or two on this particular audience. Hacker News is going to, by definition, attract a great many Type-A personalities. In any assembly of 20,000 code geeks, some will perforce be quite anti-social and unforgiving of error. So you wound up playing to a very strict crowd.

Also, the kind of culture you see on code boards thrives on a certain kind of one-upmanship, whereby spotting and correcting errors is a measure of how social capital is awarded, and hierarchies constructed and enforced. Oddly enough, a place like ES is far more forgiving of typos and the occasional miss because language experts learn to pay little attention to such things - there are bigger peeves to hold on the one hand, and we'd quickly be exhausted if we elected to police the Internet for examples of poor grammar and spelling.

In the publisher and editor groups at Linked-In, for example, mistakes and errors in usage are generally ignored. People who correct the language of others are normally derided as boors. Indeed, unless there is some very pressing reason, one should only correct another's usage by request. But pressing reasons do arise.

If one Internet user capriciously awards a linguistic drubbing to another over some petty fault, Skitt's Law is in full effect, to wit: "Any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself" or "the likelihood of an error in a post is directly proportional to the embarrassment it will cause the poster."

In such cases where you can chide the chider, it's game on.

Obviously they're important enough to cause you some measure of distress. You can wander along oblivious of accepted English usage, blissfully unaware that such things are expected by the reading public, and then one day, bang, you get featured on a blog post and your whole world falls down.

Either you can accept the mockery or you can't. If you can't, learn to write better. If you can, why are you even writing about this here? Are you looking for sympathy or for permission to write substandard English?

"Altho im spelling this wrongly and im not using commas or apostrophes your still able to read this fine and completely understand itall."

But I'm having to read it more slowly, "translating" it into English by reattaching meanings that naturally sit elsewhere. I'm also out of breath by the time I get to the end!

There's a lot of material to read out there. If I'm going to spend some of my time reading it, I really don't want to have to waste time doing that extra translation step; I probably wouldn't even finish that sentence before moving on to something else. Your "it's self" typo is a much smaller beast, and wouldn't stop me unless it was the third or fourth small error to crop up in a short time.

Following the agreed (as in "This is what happens" rather than "This is what grammarians say should happen") rules helps you to communicate with other people. Breaking the rules, unless you do it carefully and knowingly, breaks that communication to some degree. That's why we follow them.

Language, written and spoken, is the tool we have with which to communicate. Both forms have commonly accepted rules and conventions (grammar, spelling, and syntax). The message I receive from a misspelled and ungrammatical piece of writing is that the author does not care if the writing communicates. That's my first turn-off. The message now needs to be deciphered, adding a step to the communication process for me, the reader. I've already gotten the impression that the author isn't particularly interested in communicating with me; this makes me that much more likely to leave the message unread.

Having said that, there's a certain amount of syntactic "noise" that I can and do tolerate. "It's self" doesn't present as much of a barrier to comprehension as your second example, which raises the comprehension bar to the point where I would skip it, assuming that the lack of rigor in the language reflects a corresponding lack of rigor in the thought.

My too cent's worth (sic).