Hi, St. Louis-area contestant at 1979 National Spelling Bee here. I’d like to say that my spelling started going perceptibly downhill well before the internet came along.
My theories are these.
When I was a kid, every word I read was in a book. When I got older and started writing more, a larger proportion of the words I saw had been written by me and hadn’t been professionally proofed. Seeing a misspelled version, even if I wrote it, plants the seed of doubt.
This is woolier, but when I was 13, most of the words I knew were words I’d learned how to spell in the last 5 or 6 years. Now, a lot of them are words I first learned 35 years ago. Having that moment of initial learning so far in the past might make me less sure now.
I think if you look back to the times when you could be in the National Spelling Bee (i.e., eighth grade or before), you are both a better speller and a worse one. On one hand, you know vastly more words, and thus you know the correct spelling for vastly more words. On the other hand, you don’t know the correct spelling for many of those words. This is true of one’s knowledge pretty much any subject. You know much more. On the other hand, you’ve forgotten more.
I think it might be true - I’ve certainly heard adults say that their spelling’s worse now than when they were kids/teenagers. Perhaps it’s just because your adult brain has so much more filling it up, so much knowledge about things like tax returns, minor regulations and how people take their tea, that it’s difficult to access your old knowledge about how to spell words. It’s just not as important to you any more.
(BTW, in case you didn’t get jjimm’s joke, it’s because you wrote adolescents rather than adolescence in a thread about spelling. It just proves your point, I guess!)
It just proves your point, I guess!)