Most people want to resist the temptation to correlate writing skills with intelligence. (After all, wasn't Einstein said to be a notoriously bad speller?) Still, the impression conveyed by misspellings, incorrect punctuation and ungrammatical sentences is almost universally negative: The author is reflexively judged to be careless, lazy, dull—or perhaps even someone who feels unbound by established rules and conventions.

Unrestrained creative expression might seem like an attractive notion, but it's not such a good idea: It projects a sense of willful non-conformity—and, perhaps even worse, it actually gets in the way of the message! The author's intended meaning may be lost entirely because of incoherent language or convoluted structure. At the very least, a reader can't help having unflattering thoughts about the degree of concern the writer seems to demonstrate.

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