Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-27569420-20170830150441/@comment-28266772-20170831084711

Q: Why is it so bad to not have proper English?

A: People come here to get better. It's like asking "why bother learning the chords for a guitar?" and the answer is "because some people actually want to be good at it".

Q: Improper English is very common in the Internet nowadays.

A: So are idiots and pop up ads. Not sure why it should factor into any of our quality standards.

Q: Maybe have a strict rule of perfect English in articles, but why in communication?

A: The simple answer is this: people come here to learn how to write to a certain level and correct punctuation dialogue is part of that. No one expects someone to get it right every time. To this day I still post stories here knowing damn well I'm gonna get dialogue mistakes highlighted and that's good because I want to learn and it's literally 5 seconds of work to fix. As for the whole "dialogue should be informal", you're right. The content of speech can be as informal as you want so long as it still makes some degree of sense. People don't speak like dictionaries and no one says you have to write them like it either. But the punctuation that presents that dialogue should still be written to convention because it's helps keep the speech easy to read and lets the reader easily work out what's speech and what's description.

Also, it's not hard. It's less than a minute's work to fix once errors have been pointed out and over time you learn to pick up the rules that govern it.