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Comment by jasonlotito | Hacker News Reader

I've always avoided being the grammar Nazi, but it still bugs me to see lazy writing, especially from people I know. Far too often, family members ignore glaring rules of grammar without a care in the world. I fully realize I'm not a paragon of English grammar myself, but I learn when corrected.

The problem is that for many people, it does't matter as much. If you have bad grammar, or write poorly, it won't matter because so many other people have bad grammar and write poorly as well. You don't see anything wrong with it.

It's usually simple things to: capitalization, punctuation, proper tense, and spelling. I understand typos occur, and sometimes people just don't know better. Fine. The biggest problems are the use of chat words, like "u" for "you" and other problems. People use these in a casual atmosphere, and I feel it becomes normal for them. They see proper writing as work.

Meh, I dunno, mybe i be tinkin 2 much abot tis.

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There's another benefit of using proper grammar (and punctuation): It helps people whose first language isn't English.

I grew up in a mixed-language household, and I struggled a bit with English (when I was very little). I relied on the rules of the language to understand complex sentences.

Deviation from these rules may seem like no big deal to people who have internalized the language on a deeper level; but for people who are not as comfortable with English, the rules are very important.

> It's usually simple things to:

Some people! :P

I was just waiting for the first grammar or usage mistake to be made and pointed out in this thread. :-)

It's ironic that now, when anyone can publish their writing to the world in a blog, so many people don't have the writing skills to communicate effectively.

Muphry's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

Also, it's always been true that many people don't have the writing skills to communicate effectively. What's different today is that for the first time, those people have the ability to publish their writing.

I don't think it stems from really increasing the author pool so much as reducing the amount of effort put into editing the material. A good editor can dramatically improve legibility, but few bloggers are paying for it.

You raise an interesting point, but the purpose of an editor is to filter content before publication in a scarce medium so that resources aren't wasted publishing crap no one wants to read. The editor serves the owner of the means of publication and acts as a quality filter so that only content worth buying and reading will make it into print.

Unlike a printing press or a broadcast frequency, the internet is unbounded and access is dirt cheap. There's effectively no cost to publish crap, so there's no reason not to wait until after publication to filter for quality.

Editors do both. However, if you look at the standard quality of a small town newspaper from the 1920's the overall quality is not all that high. Realistically, papers like the New York Times are an outgrowth of having a huge audience which can support a lot of staff, but there used to be a lot of small players out there who had a lot less content to choose from.

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