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Whys be Good at Spelling?
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by Rob Walker | August 18, 2008 at 12:19 pm
167 views | 12 Recommendations | 4 comments
Mark Twain once lobbied the Associated Press to use phonetic spelling: "The heart of our trouble is with our foolish alphabet. It doesn't know how to spell, and can't be taught."
Maybe since so many people are spelling poorly (I know most of my fellow university students had serious trouble with spelling and grammar), we should be evolving our language to allow for these variants.
At least that's what a senior lecturer in criminology at a university in England thinks, and says that poor spelling should be left alone, so teachers can focus on more important matters.
As a writer, I like to think that the ability for people to recognize language quickly and be able to interpret words is important enough to keep as a standard. I don't want to have to figure out the social equivalent of 'l33t sp33k' when I'm reading.
Good spellers, Smith says, should be able to go on writing as usual; those who find the current rules of English too hard to learn should have their spelling labeled variant, not wrong. Smith zeroes in on 10 candidates for variant spellings, culled from his students' most commonly misspelled (or mispelled, as Smith suggests) words. Among them are Febuary instead of February, twelth instead of twelfth and truely instead of truly — all words, he says, that involve confusion over silent letters. When students would ask why there's no e in truly, Smith didn't really have an answer. "I'd say, 'Well, I don't know. ... You've just got to drop it because people do,' " he says. Smith adds that when teachers correct spelling, they waste valuable time they could be spending on bigger ideas.
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (4)
at 12:37 on August 18th, 2008
Rob Walker, I like this story. It's good stuff.
Chinese Kanji, no spelling, just 5000 sighs or called Kanji, in Japanese , Korean similar system of Writing! Actually I did read a study recently stating that people with dislecsia do rather well with Kanji!
at 14:54 on August 18th, 2008
I agree that time should be spent on more important things, my students have all written novels, we did not spend so much time on the spelling, as we did in helping them to develop the creative aspects of each of their stories, they had more fun and they were productive at the same time, it is great. They used the spell check later to perfect any mistakes.
at 14:55 on August 18th, 2008
Rob Walker, I like this story. It's good stuff.
at 04:35 on August 19th, 2008
Rob Walker, I like this story. It's good stuff. It's important to remember the learning styles of the students at all times. I have several students that aim for perfection at all levels, while others are exclusively creative.