Descriptive linguistics and the written word

When in an English class, they usually place a special emphasis on spelling and punctuation; writing is the cornerstone of pedagogical language instruction. In linguistics, however, this is absolutely not the case. We study writing systems and spelling conventions to understand historical connections (using a corpus) and to determine possible pronunciations, but the written word is not terribly interesting to us, and here's why:

• Speech appears to be universal to all human beings capable of producing and hearing it, while there have been many cultures and speech communities that lack written communication;
• Speech evolved before human beings invented writing;
• People learn to speak and process spoken languages more easily and much earlier than writing

There are, on the other hand, orthographers who study written systems specifically. Orthography, though, is a rather unpopular subset of linguistics currently; most research is going into things like syntax and language acquisition and less focus is being put on things that are more philological in nature.

In short, I don't pay attention to how people write all that much as a linguist. Ultimately writing is a data-poor fossil of how people wish they could speak. We want data about the type of communication that happens on a split-second basis outside the realm of the grammarian's conventions.