My feeling is always going to be that clear and concise communication matters. A lot of my understanding of grammar is instinctual or garnered from, you know, reading a lot (I could never tell you what a gerund was, for example), since moving around so much meant I missed the grammar/punctuation bits of English at school. I'm never going to judge people too harshly for spelling errors or a misplaced comma here or there.

However, if you want to be published, you need to be able to communicate clearly. If you want to be published, I'm going to expect you to understand that. That's not being pedantic, that's being professional. Nobody's perfect, but everyone's capable of using spell and grammar check. And hell, if you are published, I'm going to hold you to an even higher standard. (I'm sure we had this conversation over LKH and her blog about "oh, you guys understood even though my writing was an appalling mess, therefore fuck you, haterz."