So, Ayn, you hadn’t read any posts by Yozzer/Mystery Riders/Pheonix either, huh?
Lucky bastard… 
SPOOFE: no, I haven’t. Now I’m wondering myself, actually.
On a seperate note addressed to no one at all: Yes I noticed my tipo in a sumwhat amusing spot of my post where I speel “English” as “Enlish.” Oh well. Perhaps that will make my post bite even depper(ha-ha). Do you believe that?
I realize this is more a rant than a serious question for discussion, but since when has that stopped me from blathering on and on about something.
I suspect that the ease of spelling is tied to one’s learning style and how “visual” you are. Other than a few glaring and frequently embarrassing exceptions, I can spell almost any word correctly after SEEING it a few times. However, I find it nearly impossible to write anything that someone has spelled out loud to me. For that matter, I can barely write down phone numbers or anything else someone reads off. Believe me, you don’t want me answering your office phone if the message is important. I’m a visual person. I’m weak to the point of near disability in other areas.
Some people aren’t visual people, and I suspect they are the ones who find spelling a challenge.
Is there a relationship between good spelling and intelligence? I suspect so, if this “visual learning style” theory is right. I think visual people enjoy reading, for example, and they retain a lot. So your average good speller is probably someone who had always taken in a lot of information visually and been rewarded for it throughout their schooling. It adds up to being (or seeming) smarter. However, I don’t think that the opposite is probably true (that POOR spelling means low intelligence). Granted, the idiots of the world probably fall into the “crappy spelling” camp, but that doesn’t mean all poor spellers are intellectual lightweights.
I don’t have to draw a Venn Diagram for this, do I? Naw, you guys get it. Even the bad spellers.
Cranky, I think you’ve hit it exactly. I’m a good speller, and I also did a fairly good job of dealing with French (whose native speakers constantly complain about spelling complexities, leading one to conclude that they don’t learn English nearly as well as they think…) and Japanese. The key is that in learning both I would actually visualize the vocabulary list or character sheet, and work from there. Occasionally I’d remember incorrectly, of course, and that would be a problem, but a good 95% of the time it was enough. It’s hard for me to imagine successfully studying any written language without that faculty. It certainly would explain why some very bright friends of mine were reduced to tears by our college’s language requirement.
I can’t spell. I am the poster child for why you should teach kids phonics instantly. You see, phonics was taught in my school. In second grade. I was working on my third read through of Shakespeare’s Compleate Works. I also loved Kipling.
So take a voratious reader of classical literature and try to tell them how to spell. It took me to high school to spell color without a u. “c”, “s”, and “z”? I’m hopeless. I do learn visually. But I learned words from classical liturature so my visual records vary a lot. Add in this crazy idea to ‘sound it out’ and you get the crap I present on a daily basis. I’m sorry.
I think you may be on to something here. I’ve never really thought about it this way before, but I believe I must be a visual learner also (I’m a voracious reader, and an excellent speller, too). As I’ve just proven in another thread, (about Timothy McVeigh’s execution over in the BBQ Pit), my memory for detail is sad. I can drive to any place that I’ve ever driven to before, and visualize the route to get there, but I can’t tell you the names of the streets on the way or the address or name of the place. I remember faces, but not names. I can barely remember my own phone number and address, but I know where every little thing in my apartment is. Strange how the brain works.