You are, all of you, forgetting something very important about grammar: That it is about a lot more than the nitpicky details. Grammar is what makes words make sense once they have been made into sentences. It dictates what comes first, middle, and last, in a sentence. It tells us how many objects a subjects refers to. It is how you know whether the action I'm telling you about happens now, happened in the past, or will happen in the future.
In the example that came up earlier ("Let's eat, grandpa" and "let's eat grandpa") we know that those two sentences have a different meaning only because we know the grammatical rules that tell us that.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. It's impossible to get your message across if you're not fluent in the grammatical rules of the language you have chosen to write in.
Or, as my old English teacher used to say, grammar is the difference between knowing your s---, and knowing you're s---.
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Originally Posted by teh603
And sometimes coffee is just coffee, and cake just cake. Whether you join the clauses or not is more a question of how choppy you want your writing to be. This isn't Dune and we aren't speaking Imperial Galach. There's no reason to try to read for that level of nuance in someone's writing.
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No, but that is only one sentence out of many. If the person saying "I like coffee. I don't like cake." normally speaks in long flowering sentences akin to a Jane Austen novel, then the sudden change in sentence structure can be used by the writer to subtly accentuate what they are trying to say in that particular paragraph. The person may be very tired, or may be upset at something.
The ability to use the rules of grammar to accentuate and emphasize, as well as ensure that the right message goes through, makes a good writer a better writer.