There have been many things written and told about RAW and JPEG and there is a general mis-understanding among some people about the difference between the two formats and what they should be shooting. However, there is no need as it can be easily explained using a simple analogy - that of baking a cake.

Imagine you are going to throw a party for some friends and you want to provide a cake for the end of the meal. You head to your supermarket of choice and you have two purchasing options:

1. Death by chocolate double chococlate heaven delight cake (yes, I'm a chocoholic!) ready made in a pack and a small tub or hundreds 'n' thousands to sprinkle on top

2.  Flour, eggs, sugar, chocolate, and all the other ingredients that go into a cake. 

Now, depending on your purchasing choice, when you get home you have to do one of two things - take the readymade cake out of the pack and add some sprinkles, or bake a cake from scratch. 

In this analogy, JPEG is the ready made cake - for a lot of situations it will be fine, it will taste good, look good and be generally acceptable. However, if you wish to really spoil your guests, as the ambassador did at his reception (UK audience joke! - apologies to non-UK readers), then your ready made cake looks a bit limp and cheap. Instead, you could custom make your cake from all the RAW ingredients and really put some of yourself into it - and by that I don't mean chopped off ends of fingers! This, in case you didn't guess, is your RAW file. You can still add the sprinkles at the end of that, but assuming you know how to bake a cake, you can end up with a much more personal (and hopefully better) result becasue you've put your creative spin on it. 

Thought of like that, the RAW/JPEG decision is easier to make - if you want to spend time baking back home and you really want to extract the most you possibly can from the file to get the very best result, shoot RAW. If you're not sure about you 'baking' skills or you are shooting for something that doesn't need the most detail possible, JPEG will be fine - you can after all still add a little sprinkle to it if you want. 

There is a third way - the RAW+JPEG option. This really is having your cake and eating it.... you can hve all the ease of preparation of the JPEG file, but can still go back to a RAW file should you decide that you want to be a little more creative with it later. It come with a warning though - just as buying both a ready made cake and the RAW ingredients will eat up your resources (money and basket space) so shooting RAW and JPEG will consume your memory card space and hard drive space.