In the 5th Grade I had Sister Rosita. A short rotund Sister of Charity whose sole purpose in life was to get me to spell correctly. This was well before the age of Dyslexia and special needs students such as myself. Sister Rosita would shout at me, "McGarty, when will you ever spell correctly!" And I would reply, "I will have people to correct my errors Sister." Then "WHAM", the good old three foot (or should it be feet?) ruler across the knuckles.
Now Sister Rosita is a thing of the past and I have
Microsoft Word. It always spells the word correctly, unfortunately it is often
the wrong word. No matter how I look at it the word always looks correct, at
least for a month or so. Then I read it and see the error.
Now add to this mess such things as Twitter. I tried Twitter
for a few months, found it useless. Also as some may note I cannot say much
with few words. I think through something, write a draft, with mis-spellings
and all, then post it. Some folks actually read this stuff. Now along comes the
NY Times and spelling[1].
They note as follows:
Actually, we should lay off everyone’s spelling. In a
digital age of autocorrect and electronic publications that can be edited from
afar, not to mention social media platforms that prize authenticity and
immediacy over polish, misspelling has become a mostly forgivable mistake. You
simply do not need to be able to spell as well as people once had to, because
we now have tools that can catch and correct our errors — so it’s just not a
big deal if, on your first draft, you write “heel” instead of “heal.” People
are very attached to spelling, of course. When I first floated the idea that
politicians’ misspelling was a forgivable sin, I was dragged over the coals for
it on Twitter. My wife got so upset that she quit talking to me for most of a
day. When I emailed my editor to say I wanted to defend Mr. Trump’s misspelling,
she wrote back, “You should listen to your wife.” So I did what I normally do
when confronted with people who are wrong on the internet: I researched the
subject. I looked at the history of standardized spelling and what misspelling
says about you cognitively. I uncovered a rich history of political
misspelling. And I read a book by an Oxford professor on the shifting cultural
attitudes toward spelling and then talked to him for a long time. Yet there is
an even deeper sort of elitism underlying the criticism of spelling mistakes.
It stems from people correlating accurate spelling with a good education and
outsize intelligence, which is actually incorrect. There is not much scientific
evidence to suggest that spelling well is connected to high intelligence. In
the same way that some people are naturally better at arithmetic than others,
some are naturally better spellers than others (and some people have lexical
disabilities, like dyslexia, that make spelling even more difficult). But if you
spell well, you can still do lots of dumb things, and if you spell poorly, you
can still be very smart. Standardized spelling has been with English for at
least a few hundred years, and it has mostly served us well. So I understand
that the idea of abandoning it, or at least relaxing our adherence to it, may
sound frightening, like the first step on a short march to civilizational
decline…Second, there’s little evidence that how one types on electronic media
has much to say about how one functions otherwise. One study, in fact, showed
that kids who frequently used “textese” tended to be better at grammar than
those who didn’t. All of this suggests that we are simply giving too much
weight to spelling and other typographical mistakes. Focus on what people say,
not how they spell it.
So is the art of spelling lost at last? It is akin to the
"other left" syndrome where some says turn left when they mean turn
right and correct it by saying the "other left".
Spelling counts. But not on Twitter or even Facebook.
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