[jprete]

Grammar, spelling, and punctuation have never been _proof_ of good communication, they were just _correlated_ with it.

Both emails are equally bad from a communication purist viewpoint, it's just that one has the traditional markers of effort and the other does not.

I personally have wondered if I should start systematically favoring bad grammar/punctuation/spelling both in the posts I treat as high quality, and in my own writing. But it's really hard to unlearn habits from childhood.

[riversflow]

I’ve been trying kinda hard to relax on my spelling, grammar and punctuation. For me it’s not just a habit I learned in childhood, but one that was rather strongly reinforced online as a teenager in the era of grammar nazis.

I see it now as the person respecting their own time.

[mewpmewp2]

Yeah, there's this weird stigma about making typos, but in the end writing online is about communication and making yourself understandable. Typos here and there don't make a difference and thinking otherwise seems like some needless "intellectual" superiority competition. Growing up people associate it with intelligence so many times, it's hard to not feel ashamed when making typos.

[ToucanLoucan]

> Growing up people associate it with intelligence so many times, it's hard to not feel ashamed when making typos.

I mean, maybe you should? Like... everything has a spell checker now. The browser I'm typing this comment in, in a textarea input with ZERO features (not a complaint HN, just an observation, simple is good) has a functioning spellcheck that has already flagged for me like 6 errors, most of which I have gone back to correct minus where it's saying textarea isn't a word. Like... grammar is trickier, sure, that's not as widely feature-complete but spelling/typos!? Come on. Come the fuck on. If you can't give enough of a shit to express yourself with proper spelling, why should I give a shit about reading what you apparently cannot be bothered to put the most minor, trivial amount of effort into?

I don't even associate it with intelligence that much, I associate it far more with just... the barest whiff of giving a fuck. And if you don't give a fuck about what you're writing, why should I give a fuck about reading it?

[skydhash]

Same and I'm not even a native English speaker. My comments are probably full of errors, but I always make sure that I pass the default spellcheck. I even have paid for Language Tool as a better spellcheck. It's faster to parse a correct sentence. So that me respecting your time as you probably don't care about my writings as much as I do.

[tokai]

Small typos are much less disrespectful for a reader than an interposed sentence, inside parenthesis, inside an interposed sentence.

[mewpmewp2]

It's the meaning that matters, not the order of characters, words or letters. If the characters and words are in such order that the content is understandable, why should spelling matter? If anything, 2 people with equal amount of time, and a person who doesn't spend time on trivial typos would be able to write more meaningful content within that time.

Of course, if you do have automated systems setup to correct everything, then by any means, use them.

[bluGill]

Not everything has a spell checker. Even when it exists, my dysgraphia means I often cannot come close enough to the correct spelling the spell check can figure out what the right spelling is.

[throwaway29812]

> I personally have wondered if I should start systematically favoring bad grammar/punctuation/spelling both in the posts I treat as high quality

I feel like founders embrace this, slack messages misspelled etc. but communication that is straight to the point