Yes, I've noticed this too. I think my tolerance for that kind of thing comes and goes; I frequently log on in the mornings when I first get up, and sometimes I'll catch myself about to post a
really snarky discussion post. There are times that I actually have to take a deep breath and remind myself that it's not that important in the grand scheme of things if someone writes a poorly-structured question...and it's not worth giving Askville permanent evidence of my pre-coffee personality. While I get pretty up-in-arms about bad grammar, etc., in professional communications, I can usually let the Askville mistakes slide.
Why do people do this? I'm guessing that's a rhetorical question, but I'll answer it anyway.
There could be lots of reasons. The first that comes to mind is a lack of education. Grammar and syntax aren't taught in schools they way they were -
nobody diagrams sentences anymore - and I have a suspicion that with the internet and four billion channels on TV, fewer people are reading. I know that I could have used a better English education, and while I think I'm pretty coherent most of the time (after about 9:30 a.m., anyway), a large part of my grasp of English came from Mom (who was absolutely nuts about that kind of thing) and my insane reading habit. Since writing and speaking incorrectly was firmly squelched in my house, and since I had a wealth of books to show me how writing and spelling were
supposed to look, I came out alright. But very few people have a mother like mine (trust me, the whole world is heaving a collective sigh of relief) and since I'd bet that fewer people read for pleasure, the skills just aren't there.
There are times when I have to really stop and remind myself that smarts don't always fit neatly into a definition. I work with a lovely woman who's very, very smart - and she's an abysmal writer/speller. Truly, it's appalling. She's so good at what she does, and she's got a very quick mind and a heap of common sense, but she just never got the formal training she needed to be able to put her brains down on paper. She knows it, too. It's kind of sad, actually; she was thinking about going back to school to get a degree (I think she has a secretarial certificate, from back when they issued those kinds of things) but she's afraid to do it because she "knows" she won't pass math and English. And since she's so afraid of doing it wrong, her brain just locks up and she can't get herself to grasp the concepts that come more easily to us. She gets so much
worse when other people are paying attention, and that makes me wonder if some of the questions on here suffer from the same problem - some people might get so self-conscious about their lack of writing skill that they freeze up and botch the whole job.
Then there are people like me. Even when I don't know the exact rules for punctuation and grammar, I can often tell if what I'm writing "looks right." Sure, it's more intuitive than scientific sometimes, but I muddle through. When I make a glaring mistake, it's usually from lack of paying attention to what I'm doing. One of my biggest English pet peeves is the word "there" - which is so often confused with "their" or "they're." Seeing the wrong one in print is like nails on a chalkboard. So the other day, I posted a nice, supposedly literate and intelligent answer to a question, and after the whole thing was permanent, I caught myself using "their" instead of "they're." If you can believe it, I actually blushed. I know I'm smarter than that! Doesn't matter, though; I could have read that answer ten extra times before posting it, and there would still have been a mistake of some kind.
I realize that that's not quite what you're asking about; there's a difference between thinking faster than a person can type and total ignorance. But just try to remember that spell check doesn't work if the problem is a wrong word rather than a simple misspelling, and remember that the Askville dictionary isn't perfect either. (I've always found it a little humorous that "Askville" is flagged as misspelled; the spell checker tries to change it to "ask ville." Or sometimes "Asheville.") Keep in mind that just rereading something you've written a few seconds before is
not necessarily going to catch all your mistakes - it's still fresh in your mind, so it still "sounds" right to you. Beyond that, remember that tolerance for other people's shortcoming is a good thing to have; just because someone isn't all that great at writing their thoughts and questions down doesn't mean those thoughts and questions aren't valid ones.
And if that doesn't work, take a deep breath, remember that these things drive others (me, for one) just as crazy as they drive you, and move on. (If you're anything like me, I recommend moving on in the general direction of the coffee pot.) You'll be so proud of your restraint afterwards.
