OSNews

> who gives a shit about the grammatical errors

Lots of us do. I care a great deal, for instance.

Errors make the language much less readable. For those of us who know how to use the language correctly, they are intensely irritating and make a piece of text almost painful to read.

Errors impair communication. They are not arbitrary rules, to be ignored; the difference between "its" and "it's", for instance, is important, because "its" and "it's" mean two totally different things.

You would not forgive someone who sometimes said "ATI" when they meant "nVidia", or who kept mixing up "Linux" and "BSD". You'd call them a fool and ignore what they wrote. Well, "its" and "it's" are just as different, as are "there" and "their", or "there's" and "theirs".

There are rules and standards for a reason, and the reason is that they make communication more clear, less ambiguous and easier for the recipient, the reader, to understand.

Misuse and mangling of language mark the writer out as someone of below-average intelligence or poor education. In a comments board, someone who can't spell or doesn't know grammar is someone I can probably safely ignore; they have branded themselves as a fool.

Learn the rules. Use them. And prepare to be mocked, vilified or ignored if you don't.

But in an article, in a published work, for such errors to persist makes me think that the piece is not worth reading, and it makes the publishers look bad.

There is a rider to this, which is that I am a native English speaker. I do not expect perfection from someone to whom English is their second or third language. That includes, in this instance, the site editor - although Thom's written English is excellent and very nearly flawless.

However a name like Jordan Cunningham sounds to me like a British or American name. I don't know this, but it seems a reasonable guess. In that case, I expect native fluency.