I don't consider myself an elitist, but I am disgusted at the inferior “product” of the American public school system nowadays. I graduated from a public high school in 1976, back when people were taught how to spell.
Do you know why I stopped you, sir?
There should be a comma both before and after the dependent clause in the last italicized sentence above. Although you inserted the last required comma, you failed to insert the first required comma.
I will let you off with a warning this time.
Do not let it happen again.
You are right. Although I do try to focus on the actual content as much as possible.
It seems to me, though, that typos and misspellings in colloquial speech and writing, which is often used in posting, is not as big a deal. Much writing contains elements of other styles (for example a movie script will have much colloquial speech writing and the instructions will be technical writing which really shouldn't contain errors, ideally). And sometimes people will be bantering back and forth, which does not call for such conformation to standards. It helps though to try and stick close to them. Obviously there comes a point at which straying too far from the common use of language becomes a hindrance even in everyday language. In our everyday verbal speech we are anything but 'correct' in grammar and sentence structure (and obviously punctuation is irrelevant there). Just try to transcribe some speech, sermon, or TV interview sometime!
I know a lady who makes a lot of money doing medical transcription. Typos are a bad thing...you had better make sure you get it down right since it is going into the person's medical records! If there is any error it had better be that of the doctor whose voice you are transcribing.
And of course, different fields REQUIRE different levels of competence at this sort of thing. BUT it is good to strive for excellence and clarity in communication, even if a person's particular field does not require it.
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:-) On a related note:
“Verbicide, the murder of a word, happens in many ways. Inflation is one of the commonest: those who taught us to say awfully for ‘very’, tremendous for ‘great’, sadism for ‘cruelty’, and unthinkable for ‘undesirable’ were verbicides. Another way is verbiage, by which I here mean the use of a word as a promise to pay which is never going to be kept. The use of significant as if it were an absolute, and with no intention of ever telling us what the thing is significant of, is an example. So is diametrically when it is used merely to put opposite into the superlative. …The greatest cause for verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to become less descriptive and more evaluative; then to become evaluative, while still retaining some hint of the sort of goodness or badness implied; and to end up by being purely evaluative - useless synonyms for good or bad.”
Some of the comments there are pretty funny!