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orthography - Just how important are grammar and spelling?



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?




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