I Proof Because I Care

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Part of why you don't see me posting 6 blogs a day is because I like to pretend I have a life. Also, while it may take me 2 minutes to punch out a blog on a keyboard (60 wpm, folks!) I go back and proof. I look for spelling and grammar mistakes. I catch the spelling more often than the grammar mistakes. If I don't know how to spell a word, I Google it. If I don't know what a word means, I google it. If I don't have access, then I either blog later, or I don't use that word. I proof, I rewrite, I reword sentences, I do all that before I post a blog, or even post a comment. My ideas matter to me, and I want people to focus on the ideas, not my spelling or grammar.
It disappoints me to see people complain about whenever someone corrects their spelling or grammar online. People get so upset about being corrected. They act like it's some sort of witch hunt. I see it as no different than someone telling me my shoes are untied or that my backpack is unzipped. They're trying to help me. It's disappointing because the solution people seem to think is best is for people to not care, to not bother to correct others on their mistakes. Lowering the bar is no way to help anyone do better.
Writing is communication. It's the writer's responsibility to do that in a way that their audience can easily read and understand. Spelling and grammar mistakes are like little potholes in the road. They interrupt the experience. You're writing because you have a thought, an idea you want to communicate and having a bunch of errors gets in the way. They make it hard for people to understand your writing. It puts up a wall between you and your audience. The thing is, though, that you don't know who this audience is. They could be a potential mate or a potential employer. Or any number of people who could help you, or help spread your ideas.
Maybe you don't want to be a professional writer, that's fine, but you still need to be able to communicate with other people effectively. You still need to make a good impression. It's one thing to have 1 or 2 errors here and there, everyone makes mistakes. But the thing about mistakes is that we should learn from them. And we can't learn from them if we insist that nobody point them out to us. If you have multiple errors in your work, and consistently in your work, you communicate things you may not want to communicate. Everyone makes mistakes, but if you make lots of them it tends to suggest one of two things: either you're not a very smart person, or you are careless.  It's not shallow or unfair for someone to judge you on how well you can construct coherent sentences, or the amount of time and concern you take to make your message clear and easy to read. Being able to effectively express yourself is important to just about any relationship you intend to have in life.
If you don't care about your words, why express them? If you don't care how others perceive you, then why are you bothering to broadcast your thoughts?  If it's not important enough to spell it correctly, is it important enough to even say it?  If you don't care...why should anyone else?  Let's be honest, if you didn't care what people think of you and your ideas, you wouldn't bother broadcasting them to to the world.
Here's the secret: I don't spend hours working on a post. It doesn't take that long to run a spell check or read my work one more time before I publish. As a result, people almost NEVER correct my grammar or spelling ---even when I make mistakes. I earned that. If you find people are constantly correcting your grammar and spelling, well, you might want to work on those so that people don't care about the few mistakes you do end up making. Being smart isn't memorizing everything, smart people don't necessarily KNOW everything, or even know more than you, we just know how to find the information. We just want to take the few seconds it takes to do a Google search to make sure we're communicating effectively. You don't have to be OCD, or some sort of perfectionist. You just have to care about your audience. Telling folks to not point out your mistakes is telling them you don't care about them as readers. The biggest lie and biggest insult you can tell an audience is that you don't care what they think. If you don't care about them, who are you talking to?