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I have seen a lot of questions where people do not bother to spell check or capitalize their I's, and leave beginnings of sentences uncapitalized. I have seen posts that use texting abbreviations, etc. Sometimes I would like to downvote the question/answer because the person should do a better job making their work look presentable.

However, if I downvote the question or answer and then correct the grammar and capitalization, then the question is lower in the list. However, I still want to somehow get across to the person to use better grammar, etc. when posting their questions and answers.

So, I am torn. Does anyone have any suggestions? This is a problem that needs to be addressed, when people click on links to StackExchange websites from Google and look at poorly written questions and answers, they might assume a low trust level)for lack of a better word) of the website. We want to make the site look good too. So, that can done to encourage well-written content?

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  • If it's grammar, I don't downvote it and often edit. I might downvote questions where it's something like 'im writng this ona fone if u cant read sry in adv' . The lower case 'i' thing bothers me -- most cases look like a lack of interest in holding down shift.
    – belacqua
    Commented Aug 13, 2014 at 21:51

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To me, downvoting might send a message to the person asking the question, but it does nothing to help the quality of the question. I'm sure people monitoring the questions don't want to correct the grammar, opening a new can of worms, and adding comments asking the OP to correct might drive user(s) away.

AU gets people from all over the world, some that use English as a second language or barely speak it, much less put sentences together, while others can grammatically express themselves better than a lot, if not more, than us English speaking people (proper English is a second language for me, I'm from Alabama). Unless someone comes up with a really good answer, I say we just live with it for now.

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    @William at the end of the day it's your vote, if you feel the asker is wasting people's time with their lack of effort then vote accordingly!
    – Jorge Castro
    Commented Nov 29, 2011 at 14:05
  • @William - downvoting or not downvoting, but it is oh so true, many are too old for "educators" and when there are Users with age less than 20 then being downvoted is making some persons frown ...
    – dschinn1001
    Commented Aug 7, 2015 at 23:19

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