Mashed Articles

I was the sort of child who always wanted to get things ‘right’. I found spelling quite easy, as words always looked like pictures to me, and I could usually tell instantly if the word was wrong by the way it looked. I was always useless at spelling words out loud. I found it a difficult to ‘read’ the word I could see clearly in my head. But I was proud of my written spelling, which always saw even the most unimaginative piece of writing getting a good mark from the teacher.

During my MPhil in Publishing Studies, I learned how to proof-read to a professional level. As it was still the 90s, I had to exercise my proof-reading skills on a lot of hard copy. I soon discovered that ‘good’ spellers aren’t necessarily the best proof-readers. On paper, too often I assumed I knew how to spell a word, which resulted in errors. Whereas a fellow student who freely admitted he was a dreadful speller got almost 100% accuracy on our exercises. He pointed out that because he wasn’t sure of his spelling, he checked almost everything. I was fast, but he was accurate. By the end of the course, he’d learned how to spell better, and I’d learned how to slow down and check.

Learning to proof-read changed the way I read. I became notoriously picky. I worked as a copy editor in several organisations. And I really enjoyed a stint as an electronic editor for an e-learning company where I explored my geeky nitpicking side by authoring a macro that automagically corrected the persistent repeat offences from our writing team before I began my human edit.

But spellcheckers have spoilt me. Spellcheckers have been around since the 1970s, and I can remember using them to check my documents since the 1980s. But since the introduction of spellcheckers for almost anywhere a human can enter text, my spelling has deteriorated.

Word spellchecks my documents. I have web browser spellcheckers for my blogs and webmails. Even the TextEdit on my macbook can check my spelling. Tweetdeck spellchecks my tweets. Now if I don’t know how to spell a word, I don’t even try. I type in an approximation, then right-click the mispelt word to get a list of possible corrections. My spelling has deteriorated noticeably. The few letters and notes I still write by hand are much more scrawly – in some cases deliberately so – to hide my possibly bad spelling.

This is a bad thing. But I don’t believe the parts of my brain that used to store the correct spelling for hundreds of thousands of words have rotted away with misuse. Thanks to my brain’s plasticity, I know those brain cells have been reused for something more urgent and useful. Just wish I knew what…

Americans have been glorifying spelling for years now with competitive spelling bees. A few years ago, the BBC tried to make spelling sexy (or at least competitive) with the UK’s first national spelling competition. Over 100,000 children took part in Hard Spell. The competition mustn’t have been a ratings winner, as it was axed after the second year.

But the Hard Spell site is still present on the BBC’s sprawling online archive. There’s an interesting spelling game you can play to test your spelling. I’m not sure how the game is really set up. If it works off a database of thousands of hard to spell words, then this is a phenomenal game. If it’s just a sheeny shiny interface with the words hard coded into the app, then this game took a lot of development time for minimal return. Anyway. Go test yourself!

A quick google search has shown me that there are loads of software packages that aim to teach kids how to spell, from just 3 letters to multi-syllabic behemoths of words. There’s also what looks like a nice spelling app for the iPhone here – a spin-off from the successful The Times Spelling Bee website.

Seems to me that a decent piece of spelling software will be treated as a game by kids. Let them get in, test themselves, and give them rewards for improvement. I wouldn’t expect the children of Ireland and Britain to become amazing spellers. Some kids will have aptitude, others won’t. Some kids will have aptitude and just not care. Others will try.

Some skills can be quickly and easily taught to kids digitally at their own pace – spelling is one. This is the sort of learning schools could accommodate quite easily. Check out this post I did a while back on how I learned to type quickly and happily with a software programme. And how I was then bored silly for 5 years in school learning to batter an old manual typewriter in time to the teacher’s stick bouncing across an old paper chart sellotaped to the blackboard. When are we going to change the record?

Ken Smith, a criminology lecturer exasperated by years of correcting the same spelling mistakes of his students, has argued common spelling mistakes should be accepted as variant spellings. These include:

• arguement for argument
• twelth for twelfth
• truely for truly

Ken’s suggestion is that the UK accepts the 20 or so of the most commonly misspelt words should simply be accepted as alternative.

Interesting Idea. But I imagine that the possibilities for misspellings are limitless. If we accept the first 20 words, then surely another 20 will just pop up to take their place?

Following the story, CBBC asked kids ‘Does Good Spelling Matter?’ There’s a mish-mash of replies, with views ranging from ‘Oh yes’ to ‘No way’. I found two comments particularly interesting. First, Charlie, aged 12 stated that

“If a word is spelt wrong but you can read it, it’s fine.”

Obviously, communication is more important to Charlie than nit-picking over spelling. Ben, 13 observed:

“Well, I don’t think that it matters a lot, because I was reading this thing from Manchester University and it said as long as the 1st and last letters are correct, and the rest is muddled up, it looks the same. Try it yourself… E.g: because or bcaeuse.”

I wouldn’t want to be the English teacher trying to argue with Ben’s logic. A few of the comments mentioned that good spellers get more ‘respect’, which was seen as a reason for learning to spell better. But for a generation who are fluent in street speak and txt speak, communication is key.

p.s. each and every comment on the CBBC post was beautifully spelt…now either only spelling geniuses felt felt equipped to post a comment, or the CBBC team cleaned up any spelling nasties