Its very common to be downvoted or insulted because of that, im trying to get pass that problem right now
You shouldn't hold back your participation due to insecurities on your spelling or grammar. In my experience the only downvoted posts belong in the categories of; stupid, messaged which consist only of 'haha' or 'this'; Completely offtopic; Insulting or offensive; Incorrect.'
In this post I've probably used semi-colons incorrectly, this doesn't I will be downvoted because of it.
It's like the bad old days of trying to use the Eclipse IDE where most of your screen real estate is taken up with tabs and buttons and you only get a narrow 5x80 window on the world.
Except that in this case instead of the screen being taken up with masses of widgets, it is consumed with vast tracts of whitespace. Good job there, PG.
(Actually, if PG had anything to do with it, I suspect it is a well thought out policy which results because he doesn't like long conversations (possibly a signal to noise bias against long posts?) consider also that there is no easy way to quote the parent, which just wastes bandwidth anyway)
People are much more likely, for whatever reason, to dismiss mistakes when the possibility of such is explicitly acknowledged by the author.