Not sure if I should wade into this one or not, being as I am a fairly new member to this forum. Personally, I don't mind about spelling or grammar that much, but the paragraph and punctuation thing does sometimes matter - as posts without commas, full stops or paragraphs can be very difficult to read.
No-one can seriously accuse Red-Dog of making his original post on this thread (or any of the others) difficult to read, for example.
On the other hand, on another forum I sometimes contribute to, there is a regular poster who at one time never used paragraphs, capital letters or any form of punctuation. Her posts were all in one 'block', which to me resembled the legal-ese small-type 'blocks' you sometimes get at the bottom of advertisements; it was incredibly difficult to make out what she was saying, or even where one sentence ended and the next one began.
Frankly, there were times when it gave me a headache just looking at it.
The matter was complicated by the fact that we didn't see eye-to-eye on content either, and most of her posts could be interpreted as attacks against me personally. After one such attack, I actually teased her about her inability to construct paragraphs or use punctuation, by imitating her and making a post in one 'block', just as she normally did.
It's not the biggest or cleverest thing I've ever done, I'll admit. But the fact remains, that breaking up text into manageable 'chunks' helps the reader along. It improves the communication between poster and reader no end, which is after all what we're trying to do - communicate with each other.
I don't pretend to know what the solution is to the problem of how to handle posts that are difficult to read, whether one should try and get the poster to improve the formatting of their post, or just "let it slide". I suppose that is a decision for the moderators. All I know is, there is a common-sense difference between posts that are easy to read - albeit possibly with a few typos/spelling mistakes/missed commas/whatever - and posts that will give migraines to half the readers who clap eyes on them.
So in conclusion:
spelling mistakes and typos = no problem.
Simple punctuation errors or lack of capitals = no problem.
Serious errors with regard to paragraphs and punctuation = Houston, we
may have... well... possibly... ?
HOWEVER.
I definitely want to add that in my time here, I have
yet to encounter a post so badly constructed that I felt I couldn't bear to read it. In fact, rather the opposite - perhaps it's the 'journalistic' bloodline this place has (via 425), but many of Blonde's contributors are extremely eloquent and clearly passionate and obviously that comes through, in the discussions here.
I'm guessing you lot probably don't have much to worry about.
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