I read constantly, so that’s not it. In my case I think there are a couple reasons -
My spelling has gotten worse over the years, so I think #2 plays a larger role than #1.
I would be one of those voracious readers… I read constantly, normally 200-500 pages a day of recreational reading in addition to reading jounral articles for my job. I read quickly, and retain very well.
But I simply cannot spell. Spelling has never come naturally to me, I struggled with it all through school, and still spell check everything and edit compulsively as an adult. I will note that I do try to make sure things are spelled correctly before my work moves or my e-mails/letter are sent out.
I was tested for all sorts of learning disabilities, and never offically diagosed with any. The only reason I can come up with for my problems with spelling is that I learned to read by sight reading rather then phonics, and I’ve never managed to make much sense of phonetic spelling.
I’m truly amazed that this thread ran longer than five posts before Gaudere had to jump in… 
I’m a voracious reader and misspelled or otherwise incorrect words might as well be printed in neon red ink. My personal opinion is that people just really don’t care. What few blogs I have read are rife with errors. Add to that the custom/habit/need to abbreviate when sending text messages and it’s pretty much an uphill battle.
btw: I like the way your mother thinks.
I wonder how much has to do with Phonics not being taught any longer. When my daughter was in elementary school, there was a lot of emphasis on writing, but virtually none on spelling. I asked one of her teachers about it, and she said it was the “Whole Language” approach. I thought it sounded stupid, but (stupidly) I ceded to the system. My daughter read a lot for pleasure and she still likes to read, but her spelling doth verily suck!
On the other hand, eons ago when I was in elementary school (I started in 1960) there was considerable emphasis on phonics, and frequent spelling bees in class. We also had weekly spelling tests, and we were often assigned to write stories or sentences with our spelling words. It makes me think spelling is a skill like any other, and it takes practice and attention to detail.
But what do I know - I’m an engineer…
Part of being a good speller is being aware of connections between words (or the various forms of a word). For example, “available” and “avail” (as in “to no avail” or “avail oneself of…”). This would eliminate a lot of common misspellings. For instance, who would write “athiest” if they were thinking about atheism, or “rediculous” if they were thinking about ridicule?
It’s a little hard to explain, because I’ve never really thought about this, but what I seem to do is look at the outline of words for cues to spelling and letter order. “Application”, for instance, will have two letters that drop below the baseline after the A, so I know it has two Ps. I know you’ve misspelled “exaggeration” 1) because it looks weird but also because 2) there should be two letters below the baseline (the two Gs) but further into the word (at the fourth and fifth positions rather than the second). So I know the “GZ” is wrong. There are also no descenders past the Gs, so I know the J isn’t correct.
Good spellers, IME, will also have better skills for trying to spell a word correctly when they’re stumped. They will notice things like letter pairs (“millennium” has two Ls and two Ns, and “tomorrow” has two Rs) and remember oddities like “grammar” or “weird”, where words aren’t spelled like you think they would be. They notice things like one word inside other words (“ration” is inside “exaggeration”) and think about root words and etymologies. Poor spellers (and again, just IME) won’t, and just go with whatever phonemes don’t look wrong.
My mom has made the same comment about Whole Language being the cause of the problem I wonder if there is a greater propensity twords misspellings in people of my generation than any other
I don’t know if I agree with the reading thing. I read all day long, for work, for pleasure when I get home, etc. I probably spend 2/3 of my waking hours reading, and have since I was little. But I can’t spell for beans, and I never have been able to. I try (most of the time) but I get a lot of stuff wrong if I don’t have spell check.
OK, I guess I am talking about all the people who cannot complete a sentence without making a spelling mistake. All these Dopers talking about how they can’t spell, while using impeccable grammar and punctuation (and spelling, although they may have had some artificial assistance there)… they are way above average levels of competency in written English.
I would say it is a difference in people. I can’t fathom why some people struggle so with simple math.
I read voraciously and yet I am a sloppy writer and speller.
I rely on IEspell or Word to ensure I don’t misspell far more than I already do.
My method of reading seems to be for content and not exact words. Thus I glance over spelling mistakes even when I proof read.
Now the more I write, the better I get. I am spelling far better than when I joined the dope, probably as well as when I graduated so many years ago.
Jim (Surprisingly, I had no spelling mistakes in the above)
See, I don’t think like that. I take a lot of cues from the sounds of words (which when you know two languages, can lead to reading things in a very odd way on occasion) but have never been good at making those kinds of connections. And I know it’s not because I got the ‘whole language’ approach in school, because I didn’t.
And on the subject of spell check, since it’s been brought up, I LOVE the Firefox auto-check. It helps me notice words that I misspell consistently, and it helps my brain catch on to the fact that ‘that ain’t right’. (Now if only I could teach it Canadian English…)
I’m probably a better than average speller, but by no means perfect and there are certainly some words that I constantly spell incorrectly like apartment and across. It is ingrained in me that apartment has 2 p’s and across has 2 c’s and unless I consciously think about spelling them correctly, I’ll keep spelling them wrong until the end of time. The problem is, that is far more effort than I’m willing to take when it comes to spelling a word correctly so I just let spell check take care of it.
I don’t know if this post was any real help…
I’m for reform of English orthography.
Spelling shouldn’t even be an issue, because words should sound the way they’re spelled and be spelled the way they sound, as they are in other languages, like Spanish.
Or “definately” if they were thinking of “definition”…
As my mother the English teacher used to say, English is not a phonetic language. If it was, that word would be spelled fonetic, and that city in Arizona would be Feenix. 
Projammer :smack: We could have predicted that.
Usram Go back and read the thread, several of us read lots and lots and have trouble spelling.
I don’t look at letters when I read. Hell, I don’t look at words when I read. I’ve used some eye-tracking goggles to check out my eye-motion when I ready. My eye stops a few times per line, depending on how hard the reading material is. I rarely notice misspelled words, and often misspell them myself. I suppose I could “learn” how to spell, but I fail to see how this would be an effective use of my time.
I don’t see any evidence of great problems with spelling here. As the OP said, everybody makes mistakes from time to time, and English spelling is indeed inconsistent. But I’m talking about people who write like this: “Mary had a litel lam it’s flees was white as snow, And evry ware that Mary went the lam was shore to go.”
There are a lot of people whose spelling is that bad. You see it everywhere, even from people who are quite articulate in spoken English.
I, too, am a voracious reader that is also an atrocious speller. They’re completely different skill sets for me.
Like some of the other people in this thread, I’ve been a natural speed reader since I learned to read. (I was self taught at three, so I never had to learn to use phonics or whole word or any other methods.) I’m not reading each word - I’m looking at the entire sentence and allowing the meaning to be absorbed into my mind. Whereas spelling is an exercise in memorizing often illogical letter sequences with a sometime limited connection to the sound of the words. One skill has nothing to do with the other.
If they’re actually teaching English how I was taught to teach it in the late 90s, I blame the education system. We were taught four basic methods, and two of them required not making any corrections of spelling or grammar until the last drafts! What good does that do? I don’t know about you guys, but I barely glanced at my corrected final drafts. Once I knew the grade, I was through looking it over.
I think it is because people aren’t ashamed of looking dumb in text. There is little social benefit to being able to express oneself with the written word. In the absence of a payoff or punishment, people have been trained not to care whether their spelling or grammar is correct.
There is also the fact that certain misspellings are so common that people are becoming convinced that those are the correct spellings. This is the case with idiot flags like “alot” and the dreaded “rediculous.” I have seen both spring up a lot more since the internet happened. It is getting ridiculous.