Hey folks, I was the chick who asked Cecil the original question. I feel compelled to clarify one thing. The typing errors I made in my question (except, honestly, the “since i was kids”… I think I earnestly overlooked that) I made ON PURPOSE, or didn’t correct on purpose. I thought he would get the joke and see that these errors were there to make my entry more compelling, but instead he took it the opposite way: “…Your brief letter to me, in which we’ll assume you’re trying to make a good impression…”
Despite this, it is true that I am an atrocious speller unedited, mainly mixing up vowels in multisyllabic words. For example, I needed spell check for atrocious and multisyllabic. :smack:
Anyway, I’d be happy to be diagnosed as ADD/ADHD or dyslexic if they give me some good drugs for that. I’ve suffered long enuff. HAHA
The upshot: Yuo can srcmable sepllnig rthaer bdaly and sitll be albe to raed it, the most important thing being, as long as the first and last letters of each word are right. The second cite above (from Fox) deconstructs this somewhat, noting for example that the study done at Cambridge was thrown in afterwards urban-myth-style, and points out that the spelling errors aren’t all that random, and that the context of the surrounding sentence is a big help too.
I would think there are many causes like mental condition/trauma, age, etc other than stupidity that affects one’s spelling ability and cause it to decline or fluctuate. After all what is stupidity anyway?
As far as I can see, this is merely redefining the word “intelligence” (usually confined to mental ability) in order to shift the prestige (such as it is) of the word to other-than-mental things. This actually decreases the usefulness of the word, perhaps intentionally. A pernicious development, IMO.
Partially explaining the utopia we live in, perhaps.
Gardner, in 1983 (multiple intelligence theory) and Goleman in 1995 (emotional intelligence, also relevant would be Baron-Cohen’s theory of mindblindness) are examples. If one reads “The Mismeasure of Man” one also gets a grasp of the misapplication of the original intention of the Binet test (originally intended to identify which students would need more help and thus work in classes with a lower student to teacher ratio IIRC) and the somewhat imperialistic past of the intelligence test, which may be in part responsible for the phenomena of the “Stereotype Threat”.
Oh, Lily Leach, even if there aren’t any drugs available to treat one’s condition, it can be quite a relief knowing that one has it. I have dyspraxia and it’s quite useful to know why I couldn’t draw straight or play football to save my life, along with knowing why I had terrible handwriting. (my teachers called me lazy - to be fair, I am quite lazy, but that’s not why my handwriting is bad).
Except reading doesn’t work that way. This may be true for young children and inefficient readers, but competent adult readers typically do not look at individual words when they read, let alone individual letters.
If you can find someone with some eye-tracking equipment* they might be willing to demonstrate this for you. A nice trick is to focus on a single point on a line of text and read the surrounding words without moving your eyes. Many are surprised at what they can comprehend. The tracking equipment and software is important here so that you don’t cheat and move your eyes. Next repeat the above, but with a line of random letters, perhaps with some spaces. Trying to figure out what letters are more than a few positions away from the focal point is extremely difficult. Now repeat again, but this time with misspelled words. The words are easy to read, but the speling erors are difficult to notice.
*Visagraph is one brand I’m familiar with that is generally available to non-academics, but you might find something more sophisticated at a nearby university lab.
Shame on all of you rich elitists for blaming poor spellers for all your problems. It’s not their fault that the government’s “no child’s behind left” program is a failure.
As a dyslexic dysgraphic who was tested at an IQ of 132, scored an 28 on the 1980’s ACT, and has little issue making it to the absolute top level of my chosen career I deal with this misconception all the time.
English is full of homophones and inconsistent spelling rules that even spell check does not catch.
I would argue that being a good English speller is almost completely a memorization skill, and nothing to do with ones intelligence or ability to reason.
I sure can’t do it. I’ve been trying since I read this. Holding your eye steady is really hard. And it’s really hard not to focus on the word that’s right in front of you. This is also the reason I have so much trouble reading music.
And it’s not as if I read slowly, either. I’ve tested it, and I read around 280 wpm. Faster than that is in the speed reading category, and tests show that speed reading has the same retention rate as just plain skimming.
I used to be a great speller that everyone around would ask their spelling questions but lately noticing I’ve become vague on potions of many words / getting way too many red dashed underline under the words I type. It’s the welting cells thing, I believe. Something skills are not as permanent as you think.
A lot of it is memorization, true. But I believe that some people store and process words as collections of letters while others store and process words as collections of sounds. To the former, homophones are just completely separate words that happen to sound the same, and so they present no particular problems.
Although English spelling is a lot less regular and predictable than many other languages, it’s not totally arbitrary. There are usually reasons why a word is spelled the way it is, and knowing something about a word’s history or what language it entered English from or what other words it’s related to can help you to know how it’s spelled—or at least it helps me, and I’m a pretty good speller. Still, that’ll only take you so far. It won’t help you remember, for example, which celebrities spell their names “Steven” and which are "Stephen"s.
Many of the supposed “historical” spelling rules were wrong, e.g. the b in “debt”, which was added due to a Latin pseudo etymology.
I know that this will not change in our lifetimes, but to try and posit that spelling ability is correlated to intelligence is tenuous at best.
Statements like the following are particularly disheartening and are exactly like telling someone with clinical depression to “cheer up” or telling a blind man to just “just look harder”
[QUOTE=Cecil Adams]
Unfair? No point moaning about it. There’s a simple solution even non-dyslexics would profit from. Read what you write before you click “send.”
[/QUOTE]
Most of us who have a difficult time do read what we write multiple times, but I am always correcting errors up to the last moment of the allowed edit window.
As an example I have spent about half an hour on this post and it has been copied to and from Word about half a dozen times.
Thank goodness for the “Preview Post” being virtual, as any physical button would have long given up the ghost as much as I use it.
Or the English spelling “foetus”, which looks more correct since it has pointless letters, but was in fact used due to the transcribing error of a 14th century monk from what I can recall.
While I agree with you on the rule in general, both of these, in my dialect, at least, fit the rule, being homophones of rain. (I’m pretty sure some dialects make vein, fit, as well.)
I’ve been noticing changes in my spelling too. I’ve been skipping letters as I write. I always catch the mistakes myself, but it’s very annoying. It’s like mental hiccups. I still worry over this in a vague way, but unless something drastic happens, I don’t want to see a doctor. It’s such a stupid thing, and I don’t have health insurance anymore anyway. So I just chalk it up to aging and keep my fingers crossed that it doesn’t get worse.
Hey folks, I was the chick who asked Cecil the original question. I feel compelled to clarify one thing. The typing errors I made in my question (except, honestly, the “since i was kids”… I think I earnestly overlooked that) I made ON PURPOSE, or didn’t correct on purpose. I thought he would get the joke and see that these errors were there to make my entry more compelling, but instead he took it the opposite way: “…Your brief letter to me, in which we’ll assume you’re trying to make a good impression…”
