This is obviously not a question of "morality".

Linguistics as an academic field expects contributors to spell correctly. Yes, spelling errors will hurt you.

Your definition of grammar is not one I would use to describe what a linguist means when they say grammar. "The grammar" of a language is the sum of the inventory and rules internalized and used by its native speakers. The attempt to record as much of that as possible is also called "a grammar" (e.g. I checked out an "Inuit grammar" from the library.) I'm not sure what you mean about a rule of thumb for creating new text for particular audiences, but that doesn't sound like the purpose of a grammar.

There's been some good discussion on other threads about what gets called "mistakes" in language usage. Mistakes in the perscriptivist sense are irrelevant to a linguist's research. Mistakes which render sentences ungrammatical or bizarre in the generative sense are important to a linguist's reasearch.

Writing up your research using academic standards is important, so that is one area where perscriptivism (and therefore correct spelling) applies. That's still separate from the substance of research.

Linguists in general do not "care" about writing and spelling in their research. As someone said on the other thread, spelling is just a convention. There's no guarantee that it reflects any or all elements of linguistic structure. It also does not change naturally along with the language. Because it doesn't change along with the language, it can sometimes provide clues as to how a language has changed over time, but overall, it's not relevant to linguistic study.

Some linguists are interested in spelling, punctuation, and prescriptivist grammar. What they are usually not interested in are the moral implications of spelling mistakes or bad grammar. Orthographies tend to be conservative, so that even as a language changes (and English has changed a lot between 800 CE and the present) spelling resists those changes. Let's look at some examples in English. When parfit was borrowed into Middle English from Norman French it was pronounced as /'parfIt/. Somewhere in this word's history it came to be spelled more etymologically "correct" as perfect, while retaining its earlier pronunciation. Nowadays, it's pronounced more like it's spelled: /'p@rfEkt/. Whether this new development was right or wrong, it is an historical fact. Another example of this weird kind of etymological spelling mucking things up is the word admiral. You see the 'd' in admiral was placed there because somebody looked at the Medieval Latin word amiralis (from Arabic 'amiral) and knowing how Latin words like adventura were being mispronounced, stuck a 'd' in to correct the spelling. (This is known as hypercorrection; cf. "between you and I".) When English borrowed the word (from the French), we even went so far as to start pronouncing the 'd'. The point of these examples is that there's more to the history of a word than exceptionless sound changes. Another point is that many people have opinions about what is right or wrong in a language, but that does not necessarily make them right.

As for linguists, as academic professionals, of course they try to spell words according to the accepted conventions. They try to write clearly and coherently. There's a difference between observing how "ain't" is used in some dialects of English as an emphatic negative 2nd or 3rd person copular verb, and delivering judgments on a person's moral or educational worth because they use "ain't". (Not all people who speak English are academics.) It probably wouldn't be very politic to use the word "ain't" in a paper I was hoping to get published in Language, unless it occurred in one of the sample sentences. But that's far from denying me my linguistic right to use "ain't" in an appropriate non-academic context.

"Ain't" seems pretty uncontroversial in this way, in that most anglophones would agree that its use is mainly confined to non-standard dialects of English. Where prescriptivists get on descriptivists' nerves is where they say that "ain't" is ungrammatical. One thing that native speakers do quite rarely is make true grammatical mistakes. What most speakers of different dialects immmediately notice of one another is that they speak (and write) differently. Just because "ain't" is not grammatical in standard academese does not mean it's ungrammatical in casual colloquial English. And I've just been talking about the use of "ain't" in the 2nd and 3rd person. (e.g., "He ain't gonna graduate this year.") What's less clear is why "ain't" is to be deprecated in the first person. Why should we say "I'm not going to clean my room!" instead of "I ain't gonna clean out the garage."? (My tenure could in no way be influenced by this domestic utterance.) Ain't seems to be a perfectly grammatical contraction of "am not" similar to "can't" and "won't". But somebody somewhere got mighty upset with "ain't" probably because it was starting to be used with the two other persons. Also, weirdly enough, a strange mispronuciation of 'ain't" came to be used in tag questions: "I am a professor of English, aren't I?" instead of the more logical "I am a professor of English, ain't I?" This pronuciation probably had more to do with certain classes in England dropping their 'r's in words that had them etymologically / spellingwise, and inserting 'r's where they didn't belong.

Finally, if I were teaching English, I would indicate misspellings with a red pen just like everybody else. But I would try to remember that we speakers of English have been saddled with one of the most arbitrary and godawful orthographies in the modern world. We spend way too much time in school trying to teach this terrible system to people instead of modifying it as other modern languages have done. Only the Chinese and the Japanese seem to have more arbitrarily difficult writing systems. At least English uses an alphabetic writing system, but our spelling conventions are less than optimal.

Here's one answer.

I'm dyslexic. Before I send out any letter to an editor, article to be published, or realllyreallyreally importantly, a professial letter such a "job application", i make sure my hubby or best friend reads it over.


Cause yes, there is a difference between what lingusits see as a "change over time", and what grammarians see as "errors."

a speaker of BEV (black English Vanaculer) must learn or appropriate the "standard english" if he or she wishes to be taken seriously in a court of law, as an actor, or as a high end sales rep. (there is a wierd parralle, however, that if i go to a 'black church', i just sound condescending when i attempt to use BEV).

Linguists do not cast aside the protocols of Standard Americna (or British) english, they just understand why things change over time, and why we no longer say "thee", and why "could of" is becomming a norm in "casual" places like the internet, or office writing.

"correct" "right /wrong" are about the people publishing the work. No legitimate journal - be it on Linguistics, or Religious studies, or ATomic Theory - would let you just "make up" your spelling as it suited you.

does that help at all?