Some members do not proofread what they have written, some are used to informal communication channels, and some are not native English speakers. The result is that posts frequently have incorrect capitalization, punctuation, spelling, grammar, etc., making reading them difficult and unpleasant.
None of this has anything to do with whether the questions they are asking, or the answers they are offering, are on-topic, interesting, correct, etc. On the other hand, I remember reading that there is an expectation that members make their best effort to write proper English.
If I think that someone is just being lazy, and making no effort to improve, is it unkind to downvote them because of their writing if there are an “excessive” number of “obvious” mistakes?
Examples of “obvious” mistakes, which anyone can learn to avoid by reading English for five minutes: Not capitalizing the first word in a sentence. Not ending a sentence with a period or other appropriate punctuation. Not putting a space after the final punctuation in a sentence. Not breaking up walls of text into paragraphs. Not capitalizing the pronoun “I”. Not capitalizing people’s names, especially when they are very famous physicists or mathematicians. (Perhaps this is just me, but I find that last one extremely disrespectful.)
I have no interest in being a cultural imperialist, but, given the fact that this site operates exclusively in English, my opinion is that the English should be at least C-grade.
I am entirely open to arguments that the quality of the English should not matter at all, or that I should simply fix or ignore the posts that bother me.