There are, in fact, people out there who value linguistic competence. Like this guy.
Excerpt:
Do we say “the jury was deadlocked” or “the jury were deadlocked”? Do we say “one pant leg was ripped” or “one pants leg was ripped”?
I realize that some of you—hopefully most of you—do already know this stuff, maybe not in technical terms, but you know it. Even so, I’ll bet that most of you will find something in here that you were not aware of. My goal is to make you all better writers, and sometimes a little review doesn’t hurt. It might point out a mistake you weren’t aware you were making.
As an editor, I find myself hypercritical of advertisements on TV, radio, on signs, and ad copy in general. One has to wonder about the competence of the copy editors at some of these ad agencies when we do see blatant mistakes. For small companies, it’s possible that someone in the company wrote the ad rather than paying an outside agency. Granted, typos and grammar errors probably won’t affect our decision to purchase from a car dealer or to hire a contractor, but if the advertisement is for something where spelling and grammar matter, then that calls into question the quality of the work we’re considering paying for.
It doesn’t make a good impression if an author’s website is laden with spelling and grammatical errors. Even if the author uses an editor for his or her writing, the website should also be reasonably free of errors. I admit that I make errors on my blog, usually caused by rushing to finish the blog. Since I’m also an editor, I should really be more careful.
On the other hand, if the website is for a publishing professional selling services to authors, glaring grammatical and spelling errors will leave a poor impression.
(emphasis added)
What he said.
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