I don't know if I should write what I'm about to write, but here it goes. Punctuation and grammar are important. The way we write tells a lot about us. Even if we don't think it is important to follow some of the rules, it will at best show that you are not concerned about following something that is an established standard. At worst you can be easily interpreted as someone who is if not uneducated than at the very least lacking in many respects. On one end, it is very superficial and can lead to some presumptuous judgements or making a poor first impression. On the other hand, it is the writer's fault for assuming that others have just as loose opinion on certain standards and disregard 'arbitrary' (but then again you are guilty for saying that something is arbitrary… arbitrarily ;P) rules. More so, as goobster pointed out, there are quite a lot of differences between the way we write and speak. Something that simply sounds right is oftentimes a wrong way to write it and vice versa where something that looks right can make you cringe after saying it out loud. That said, it's important to recognise if perhaps the rules and standards of the language keep up with the way we communicate. I don't know how this will hold for English, but here is my pet-peeve in Polish that is pretty much vestigial but enforced strictly and for a reason that almost no-one alive remembers. And even then, it was mostly the people with higher education. Back then, you could quite literally tell if someone is of higher education by the way they pronounced even the everyday names and objects. We have many repeated letters. There's u and ó, h and ch, ż and rz. They have their own pronunciation rules, grammar, ways of spelling etc. However, most people who cared about different pronunciation were pre-WWII academics. But after events like Katyń Massacre and lesser known Intelligenzaktion have pretty much purged people who knew the difference. Today we still have to obey these complex rules, but even modern academics speak like majority of pre-WWII people. Paradoxically and for a reason that I can't explain, most of the people who still use different pronunciation live in rural areas of Poland, which while much closer to proper pre-WWII Polish sound just wrong to many people from cities. Anyway, some examples: -Chemia (chemistry), Herbata (tea). - Chrom (chromium), Hrabia (count, the title of high nobility not as in "I'm counting things"). Exchanging h to ch in any of them would look weird, but most people would say them without any real difference. And as I have mentioned, most of them are from rural Poland and unlikely to even bother with academia. Same with other letters that have dual notation. It's important to follow standards, but said standards must be: - Clear. - Reflect a way the language is used. - Allow for providing the strictest meaning that you want to convey with minimal amount of exceptions. If that's not met, it's going to be only a growing problem.