Can a literate user be encouraged to stop deliberate writing errors?

Question

As a grammar and punctuation pedant, I spend some time on fixing the quality of questions (and some answers) on SO. In the vast majority of cases, I am quite sure the OP genuinely doesn't have excellent English, and so silently improving it — in my view — aids English and non-English speakers alike, whilst avoiding direct criticism of the writer.

However today I found a user who I suspect is making persistent writing errors deliberately for stylistic reasons — posts are all in lower case, and all punctuation marks have space prefixes, often resulting in orphaned marks. I politely pointed this out in the comments¹ but the lack of reply suggests to me that they intend to persist. A quick click through some of their writing shows that it is a popular error to fix, so thankfully it isn't just my OCD!

In general, if a user — a very helpful one in this case — is deliberately creating edit work, what can be done about it?

¹ Sadly, a moderator deleted this conversation, in which the user took offence, refused to justify their mistakes, and chose to ignore others who added their agreement.

Answer 1

There is an expectation that users of Stack Overflow treat the site like a professional resource. For the most part, that means using proper spelling, grammar and punctuation. It's an important enough issue to be baked into the system in several ways:

1. Automated low-quality posting blocks.
2. Automated low-quality posting bans.
3. Suspensions for repeatedly asking low-quality questions.

"This is my personal style" is not an acceptable excuse, nor is posting from a cell phone. Find a real computer to post your questions with.

Other Considerations
Users whose first language is not English are already at a sharp disadvantage, which is why their close ratio is higher than most. Like other rules, we do bend them occasionally if the OP manages to post questions that are so scintillating that we can overlook their bad grammer [sic]. We don't generally suspend users unless they demonstrate a persistent pattern of behavior that is harmful to the community.

What to Do
Flag one of their "stylish" posts with a custom explanation, describing what the problem is. We will take the appropriate action.

Answer 2

Well, first off, unless they come out and directly say "I'm deliberately doing this" we don't know that they're deliberately doing it - so nothing can be done about it but editing the posts to fix them. Even if they admit it, it's not something that would warrant any kind of suspension.

If they, however, were actively rolling back edits that corrected grammar, spelling, etc - that would be an abuse of the editing system and is something that should be flagged so moderators can take appropriate action in warning and/or suspending them.

The simple fact is, some people just don't care enough to use the Shift key, just like some don't care to hit the ' key when appropriate. They've adapted themselves to an alternate way of typing that is irritating to some people.