I weep for the accelerating loss of distinction between “every day” and “everyday”.
Waaaahhh. sniff
He he.
Yes I am aware of the difference. But often too lazy to note that I have made the mistake.
Can’t we simply blame it all on autocorrect and all get along?
Summary so far.
Bad spelling doesn’t mean you are stupid, but it can, and fairly frequently.
Bad spelling is often the result of laziness (in initially typing and then not editing afterwards).
Bad spelling can be the result of ADHD, dyslexia and other real conditions. It can also indicate someone who is chronically unable to spell. But this is only a minority.
Importantly, many people (I’m afraid I’m one) do look at spelling, and grammar, as indicative of the care someone has taken in trying to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others.
“Language is a living thing and changes occur” is an excuse not a reason. Language is for communicating, if you introduce ambiguity or lack of clarity through bad spelling or grammar then you are failing the primary function of language. Freedom of expression is limited to those able enough to be free AND clear.
It is up to the writer to be clear and precise and not up to the reader to try to interpret what you have written. In other words, reread your posts (and get someone else to read important documents). Really, you should never write something and press ‘send’. Reread it at least once.
And for those who think English is convoluted, try learning another language. Other languages do have the equivalent of spelling bees - I went to secondary school in France and had ‘dictée’ (dictation) right through to age 14. It tested spelling, noun/adjectival agreement, subject/verb agreement, gender agreement and a whole lot of other things that English doesn’t have. But I can spell well in both languages until I come to “false friends” like correspondance and correspondence (one’s French, the other’s English but which is which?).
Bad spellers are not stupid. All the editors where I worked had degrees from places like Harvard. The head editor where I worked told me that the best writers were hired because of their creative ability, humour, and research ability—coming up with a good slant on a story, making it interesting, and being able to do the right research ask the right questions. They said some of the most expensive writers they hired had horrible grammar and spelling. Good spellers are usually obsessive, compulsive, boring people who only care about small details and not the bigger picture and they are the ones that become editors.
Yes, that is an acurate genneralization about bad and good spellers.
Years ago I was a regular in a chatroom and others were also. One regular decided he’d start his own newsletter and started emailing them to, among others I assume, some of the chat room regulars, including me. Well, the newsletter was very difficult to read due to many typos, misspellings, punctuation errors or lack of punctuation, and lack of capitalization. Several of us mentioned to him in the chat room that they were hard to read and his explanation was that he wrote very quickly in a stream of consciousness sort of thing (not his wording) and couldn’t be bothered to slow down to do unimportant stuff like correct his spelling/typos and fix his grammar and punctuation. By the time his 3rd newsletter went around, there was no further mention of his habits in the chatroom because everyone there who had received them had just blocked their inboxes from accepting any email from him. I don’t know if he got the message or not.
As for me, I’m not even in the neighborhood of the ballpark of the smartest people here. I write many run on sentences and use commas by the carload. I truly should have paid a LOT more attention to Miss S in 7th grade English. So I figure the least I can to to make my writing legible enough to get my thoughts across is to spell correctly and take a swing at punctuating it properly. I’m fairly good at spelling; the only red squiggle I got in this post was the second time I typed “chatroom” instead of chat room and frankly, I’m not all that certain the proper spelling of that has been standardized.
Think of all the money we’d lose to spammers if they didn’t give themselves away by being rotten spellers.
It’d run into billions annually.
If you put the sentence “Why do spammers spell so badly?” into Google, you’ll get several webpages that offer an explanation for this. The spammers do it deliberately. They want to limit their replies to people who are gullible. The people who know that an E-mail with bad spelling and grammar is certain to be a hoax are not the ones that they want to communicate with. The people who reply to the message despite the bad spelling and grammar have already passed the first test in gullibility and are worth the spammers’ time in getting them to give them money.
The study of Latin in youth is an enormous help in spelling many English words. Knowing why words are spelled as they are is a great benefit.
But the mainstay of spelling well? Reading, reading, reading.