Robert Harvey asked: How important do you believe the use of good grammar, spelling, punctuation and capitalization by users is? How do you respond to such deficiencies?
kiamlaluno answered: It's important to allow other users to understand the question being asked, but it should not be the only measure of the posts' quality.
casperOne answered: I typically edit for such things, I think they are very, very important. SO prides itself on organic search results. Because of that, it's important that the content on the site is quality content that makes it easier for search engines to do their jobs. It's also why there is a wiki component to the site; it's so we can constantly refine content to make it better for all.
Neal answered: Well both of my opinions on that subject were turned down on meta: Are Stack Exchange sites forums? and Should others downvote my posts for "grammatical" reasons? I stand by the 1st one and the lol one I now understand more, but i feel it is not a reason to downvote or ridicule people because of it.
Barry answered: To ask a great question (which is what the site is about yes?) the post needs to be coherent and readable. I'd edit the post and post a comment pointing them to the FAQ and my edit as an example of how to format/spell/construct their question. I'd probably post the link to the article Jon Skeet created for asking questions.
genesis answered: To be honest, I'm not so good at English, but I'm always using the correct punctuation and capitalization. When I see a post with some i instead of i, r instead of are, u instead of you, I'm always trying to correct them as my knowledge of English lets me
minitech answered: If it's unreadable, it's an issue - but regardless, I edit the post to correct all issues. It helps people learn good English.
Brad Larson answered: Language is not as important as having a good core question. It's trivial to edit a roughly worded question into shape, but you can't fix truly bad content. With a growing population of users that don't have English as their native tongue, we have to be willing to help people with their wording, not just reject them outright. The one exception to this is the use of txtspeak, which really grinds my gears.
BoltClock answered: As long as it makes sense, and doesn't look more like chatspeak/laziness than an imperfect but OK ability to form sentences, I'm fine with it.
awoodland answered: For non-native English speakers I respect and appreciate the fact that they're making an effort to communicate in a language that might be quite hard for them. for native English speakers it can be an indicator of lazyness which I don't like, however I recognise that even for some native speakers there can be good reasons for poor writing style. As a non-mod I try to fix these. As a mod I would defer to the community generally unless...
awoodland continued: ...the post was attracting the wrong kind of attention (e.g. abusive comments, close for what was otherwise reasonable)
Stu Thompson answered: I do believe proper it is important. Programmers should like proper syntax, right? Posts with a stray missing capitalization are not worthy of an edit, but posts that in really bad shape do. All of my coworkers are non-native English speakers, they prefer me to correct them. I've taken this habit to SO. The only time a post should be deleted because of poor grammar is when it is totally incomprehensible that it is beyond salvage and the user has not cleaned it up. Nobody's perfect.
Moshe answered: Spelling and grammar are important for communication. Capitalization is also important. Generally, I'd try to assess where the deficiency stems from. If the user uses textspeak, it's not the same as just plain poor grammar skills. Sometimes it's negligence and sometimes it's a result of lack of knowledge.
