From the January 14, 2011 edition of Inside Higher Ed:
“Editing Matters”
by Carmen Werder and Karen Hoelscher
Editing — oh, whoop-de-do — hardly a topic of intense interest in and of itself. One challenge of focusing on issues such as grammar and usage is that they seem to matter only when they’re not in place. Unlike matters of content, where you can impress readers by developing intriguing ideas and clever metaphors, editing issues seem mundane and not a topic for engaging others seriously — except, perhaps, for rhetoricians or grammarians.
Your readers simply assume you will follow the appropriate conventions until you do something to suggest otherwise.
So why get too worked up about it? After studying the responses of 14 non-academics (business people) to various kinds of errors, Larry Beason suggested why: while the range of reactions tended to be broad, with some patterns of agreement, the ultimate result of error was that readers “constructed a negative ethos of the writer.”