I am a bad speller. That is, I may not know how to spell a specific and uncommon word when I try to write it. I'm probably slightly dyslexic. Incorrectly spelled words, however, trip one of my visual circuits. They scream at me. Mostly, I say nothing (you can check). However misspellings such as: ignor (ignore), independance (independence), betrayl (betrayal) and hypocrasy (hypocrisy) which I have recently seen in recommended diaries and popular threads tear me up.
In many cases I agree with the posters and believe that they make a powerful argument. Which is then emasculated because the repeated spelling errors (they are not one-offs) provoke dissonance in the reader. By the way, this is in no way an attack on the particular diarists or posters who used the above spellings.
Fortunately...
... help is available. In many browsers spell checkers are there to help those of us who are orthographically challenged. Otherwise, it is always possible to compose in Word or some other spell-checker enabled application. If that is not possible, then I definitely recommend the
preview option on posts. Speed only
seems to be of the essence, most of the time.
Taking the time, especially in a diary, (which, if it grabs the attention of a number of dKossacks, may make the Recommended List and therefore be read by possibly hundreds of thousands of people) to ensure that your use of the language is good both for you, the poster, and for the wider community. Your ideas are more likely to be accepted and discussed and the general level of discourse and respect for the site will rise.
I do want to distinguish between things which are time critical and those into which some thought is meant to have been put. Obviously, if you are saying, breathlessly, with bullets in your back, "They're coming, they're coming," no one is going to mind if you wrote "Their coming, their coming!!" If, on the other hand, you took ten or twenty minutes to think up your diary, you can easily spend another thirty seconds to check the spelling and even the content. Did you really want to say this or were you just yelling at the PC?
[Update]: Most people of a small sample seem to think think this is important. If you agree it should be discussed further, please recommend this diary.