I think the real problem is that there are virtually no writers who turn out horrendous messes who go on to a book deal. These are the people who envision a movie being made of their heap of shit.

I noticed “real” writers will be in a big hurry to correct their errors, like they simply must put away the mistakes immediately. The others will either argue, or be angry that they are expected to make revisions.

The other thing that bothers me are people who ask me to read something that is so full of errors, you can barely get the gist of the story. So I hand it back and tell them they need to go through and read it and edit it themselves again. They see proofreading as a minor detail beneath them and you should fix all their mistakes. Or, they tell me not to worry about the errors, but give my feedback on the story — not understanding that no one can follow a plot when they are constantly jarred by punctuation mistakes.