Why can't people spell?

In My Humble Opinion
41

elfkin is right in that the schools have to share some of the blame.

When I was in school, we had regular weekly spelling tests.

You got a list of ten to fifteen words at the beginning of the week. You went over them and at the end of the week you took a quiz which was usually nothing more than the teacher reading aloud the word, using the word in a sentence and then repeating. As in: “conscience. The boy had a guilty conscience about pimp slapping his sister. conscience.” And we in the class dutifully spelled out the words and in the end, your answers were either right or wrong.

Did this method make the lot of us better spellers? Not very likely. But it did ingrain, on some subconscious level that Hey! Spelling counts and you need to try to get the word right.

This idea now seems hopelessly quaint.

Case in point.

As a teacher who worked summers scoring standardized tests featuring Brief and Extended Constructed Responses, kids today don’t even make the slightest attempt. Forget for the moment that large number of high school students -high school students, mind you- can’t demonstrate the proper spelling of basic words such as pencil and cousin (those are the two I always feature as examples) but I recall a writing prompt that directed students to respond to a brief biographical passage about Beethoven.

The other scorers and I lost track of how many creative spellings of ‘Beethoven’ that students used: “Baytoven, Beathooven, Betoven, Baytoeven, etc.” when getting the correct one would have involved nothing more than copying from one page to another.

Why couldn’t students be bothered with this? Because they have accepted and embraced the notion that getting the proper spelling for a word is irrelevant.

42

How many schools have stopped doing this? My kids schools still work on on spelling with weekly tests and spellling journals.

43

I like the right-brained v left-brained argument. My father is one of the most intelligent men I’ve ever known, a skilled carpenter and a rapacious reader. He has incredible spatial relationship skills, can visualize details and plans and geometric concepts instantly and correctly, but can’t write legibly or spell correctly to save his life. I chalk the bad handwriting up to him being a forced righty as a kid, although it worked out well in his profession, he’s always been able to hammer ambidextrously, but the spelling is a mystery.

On the other hand, I’ve always had a fairly easy time with spelling and grammar, took loads of lit and comp classes in school for the easy grade, etc. Working out the simplest mathematical task, like where to pound nails into the wall to hang a picture frame so that it’s even and evenly spaced is torture.

44

The plural of anecdote isn’t “Data.” Sorry, I know it’s a cliche, but it’s true.

The notion that spelling skills have declined from when they taught phonics (and lots of kids, if not most of them, are still taught phonics; the scope of this alleged sea change is a bit overstated) relies on the assumption that people used to spell better than they do now. Nobody has ever presented any evidence that this is true, and personally, I don’t see any reason to believe it WOULD be true. I get to read things written by people from ages 18 to 65, and I don’t see any correlation at all between age and writing skill. I see a substantial correlation between education and writing skill.

We were taught phonics and had spelling bees when I was a kid… and there were still lots of really terrible spellers. That’s my anecdote.

45

My husband and I are excellent spellers and read extensively. All three of our children (32, 21 and 17) are “readers,” but only the oldest and youngest are good spellers. Our middle daughter is the only one of us who is artistic/musical. She is incredibly creative, including her spelling. Adding further to the anecdotal nature of this post, my son-in-law seldom reads anything beyond Sports Illustrated, but he is an excellent speller.

IMHO there is a much bigger link between reading and vocabulary than there is between reading and spelling skills.

46

Agreed. Sometimes I almost think it’s to my detriment that I notice almost all misspellings, errors in punctuation, etc. Every mistake is like a speed bump for my brain. I’d probably be better off if I could let the ideas flow and ignore the spelling.

47

I am another voracious reader and terrible speller. It’s been a family joke for years that I could read at a 12th grade level in 5th grade, but can’t spell. I was taught phonics from 1st grade, and aced all my spelling tests. I can memorize a list of words for a week, but then they’re gone again. I sucked at spelling bees.
For me, the inability to spell is sort of like the inability to remember names or recognize faces. When I write or type a word, I start second guessing it. Does that word have two "p"s? Did I put an “a” where an “e” belongs? And it’s many times worse when I’m posting here because I know the spelling pendants are reading, and I’m too lazy to spell check when not using Firefox.

48

I’m starting to think there’s something perversely Gauderean about all the people who are posting to this thread saying they are bad spellers—in posts that are spelled perfectly.

49

I think you mean ‘rediculous’ :wink:

The internet does propagate bad spelling. In the interest of speed shortenings have become quite common, and has led to the evolution of ‘chat speak’, which makes my head hurt and slows down reading. And when you’re trying to carry on a realtime conversation in text, spelling tends to become secondary depending on how fast things are moving. Some people grow out of it, some don’t. People’s writing skills probably decline once they start wandering the web because of these factors (This is one of the reasons I love this board. No chat speak=no headaches).

50

According to Firefox, there are only two misspelled words in that sentence, litel and evry.
Lam, it’s, flees, ware, and shore are homophones*. Right sound, wrong word. While I agree that using the wrong word does not impress people with your English abilities, I can’t call those misspelled words, since they are not misspelled.
For the most part, I don’t have problems with homophones, there are just some words I have no clue how to spell. If I get it close enough for spell check, I consider that a victory. If that does not work, I will ask my wife or daughter, or go cruising** through dictionary.com

*Looking this up, I went for homonym which I spelled as homonins the first time through.
**crusing on my first attempt.

51

The words that trip me up are the -er, -ar, -or endings and the word

SEPARATE.

52

I’m going to risk an asskicking here and suggest that 3 reasons a lot of us can’t spell are a) masculinity, b) patriotism, and c) authoritarian beliefs. I say this because I never saw as high a percentage of bad spellers anywhere as I did on a discussion forum about hazing in military training. Those in support of it - by far the majority - were almost all male military veterans who could barely spell, or in some cases, even write.

I do not wish to imply that all or even most of our current or former servicemen have trouble with written English - merely those most likely to express authoritarian sentiments.

53

There’s much less of a premium being placed both in the education system and in society at large with being able to spell correctly. In part this is due to how much writing is now done electronically, and the availability of built-in spellcheckers in software (and ha ha, the word “spellchecker” is currently being underlined in red in my Firefox session). Arithmetic gets much less attention now in elementary school, because who needs to be able to do long division in their head when everyone’s carrying around at least one device with a built-in calculator (cell phone or iPod)?

Also, while I believe that anyone can become a reasonably good speller through effort, concentration and drillwork (but the incentive to put in that effort is much less than it used to be), there are people (like me) who are naturally good spellers, and people like my wife who continually asks me how to spell words like “ridiculous”, “separate” and even “thorough”. These three being words she’s asked me how to spell in the past 24 hours as she wrote email in an editor without a spellchecker. And she’s the one with a Bachelor’s degree, with honors, in English.

The reason is that I think of words as text. I never really did the phonics bit in my head while learning to read, except maybe very early on. There were and probably still are words that I’ve only read, and never bothered to sound out in my head because it wasn’t clear to me what it would the pronunciation would be, and it just didn’t matter to me to figure it out since I could see what it meant in context. And to me, choosing le mot juste, just the right word to use in a given context, is an art form all its own. I make puns and do crosswords. Funny quotes, particularly from The Simpsons, pass across my frontal lobes all the time that prompt me to smile or laugh for no apparent reason.

On the other hand, to my wife words are conduits to convey ideas or images. She reads sentences and passages, and images flow through her mind, not words. She isn’t one to remember quotes, but rather ideas and plot lines. She can appreciate poetic meter and phrasing but it doesn’t stick with her. This is particularly funny when she’ll try to remember the title of a book or movie and substitutes an inappropriate synonym for one of the words (most famously, “that Al Pacino movie, what was it, Stench of a Woman?”)

BTW, though she did do the English honors major, she also did a dual major in Math and that is what she has gone on in – she’s a PhD and research mathematician in geometry. She’s very visual and shapy (shapely too, if I do say). She’s highly analytical and spatial, but NOT particularly verbal. She takes sarcasm intended as humorous or ironic as serious and often insulting.

54

Sigh.

Until spell and grammar checkers can tell people whether “there”, “their” or “they’re” is the correct usage, I still have a useful idiot barometer.

And the idea that simple math is getting less important is nonsense. I work in a technical field. I’m surrounded by computers and have three pocket calculators scattered around my various work areas. But I still use basic math every day, if nothing else as a check to make sure I haven’t fat-fingered something on a calculator.
*
Let’s see, I need to add 50 ppm cobalt octoate to a blend that is 4217 g total. If my calculator doesn’t say something close to 0.2 g, I’M DOING IT WRONG.*

55

The grammar checker is useless. It wants me to change “and we never” to “and us never”!

56

I am an avid reader, a decent writer, a phonic-educated early reader, a very verbal person and a horrific speller.

I think a good part of it is that my brain is always a few words ahead of my fingers. I type about a billion words a minute and it’s a rush to get stuff down on a page before it leaves my head.

Another is that I just don’t have the ability to look at a word and see that it is incorrect. You know how if you say a word over and over again you stop being able to tell if it is a real word or not? It’s kind of like that feeling. I always thought that was related to me not being able to do math (i.e. being more of a concept person than a detail person) but it seems like the two problems arn’t always tied together.

With practice, drills and slow typing, I could learn to spell better I am sure. But the cost of better spelling would be a lot of ideas would be lost while I was pecking away at the keyboard.

57

An illuminating example of the limits of spellcheckers – “pendants” is a perfectly good word to describe hanging jewels, but “pedants” is what you meant. And yes, I’m aware that I’m distinguishing myself as a pedant by pointing this out…

58

I can spell, but my mother and sister (who is about to become a librarian) are voracious readers who can’t. They read constantly, both fiction and non-fiction. They process written information. They like books and writing and words. And neither of them can spell worth a lick.

AudreyK’s theory may very well be true for them.

59

Just a sad but amusing anecdote: A while back at work, a coworker who is in his mid-20s was composing a text message on his phone, and was stumped on a bit of spelling. He approached me, mentioning that he’d seen me reading a lot, which in his eyes made me the person to ask, “How do you spell ‘busy’?”

Sigh.

60

I’m a reasonable but not perfect speller but I remember that when I was receiving my joining hazing some dummies,including incredibly a British school teacher from an elite school,picked me up on my spelling because they were too ill informed to realise that British and American spellings differ.

Plough-Plow

Favourite-Favorite

Colour-Color

and so on.

Theres none so dumb as those who are too dumb to know just how dumb they are.

I suspect that the Brit.teacher joined in because he recognised my somewhat timid nature and he being a coward joined in with the bullies.

I often cry myself to sleep remembering it even now.