Does spelling still matter?

Who else is a walking dictionary for their families and friends?

I think it was a combination of a few things.

I learnt a bit of Latin from my big sister’s text books when I was about 5 (lonely youngest child syndrome), and I read a lot, and for some reason word sequences made sense to me. I’ve always been one of those people who can spell any word if I’ve seen or heard it before.

Big shout-out to any other walking dictionaries out there – it’s a huge responsibility, and I didn’t ask for it, but I seem to be stuck with it.

Apparently a few factors help spelling ability.

1.Being able to recognise letter patterns and general spelling rules, and having a clear mental ‘picture’ of a word (orthography).

2.Understanding how words are formed (morphological awareness). Words are made up of prefixes, roots, and suffixes (morphemes) – sorry, school vibes eek. Ironically, the ‘dead’ languages Latin and Greek are really useful for this – being able to break down long words into their short segments is one of the best ways to learn, spell, and feel confident about remembering complex words. No more strings of meaningless letters.

That’s particularly useful, as scientific and technical words are often long and complex – which I guess is why they used to tell us to learn Latin if we wanted to study STEM subjects.

3.A decent working memory helps, to account for all those words in the English language that don’t follow the proper rules (and those memory jerkers like ‘i before e except after c’).

4.If you read a lot of books, you’ll come across more words and learn more meanings and spellings.

5.Some people have a photographic (‘eidetic’) memory, or like to visualise or imagine words on a page. I used to be able to recall whole pages of text when I was young, but sadly that skill’s no longer with me.

6.I often find myself saying a word to myself as I write it – that’s how a lot of reading teaching works (phonics).

What does being able to spell say about us?

In general, people who can happily spell more words write longer text and use a wider vocabulary.

And also in general, readers assume that people who make a lot of spelling errors are less intelligent, professional, hard-working, competent, and reliable.

That seems harsh and unfair, but it explains why it’s so important to check your spelling on CVs and websites.

Does spelling even matter now?

Maybe it doesn’t matter now, with AI auto-correcting everything – but AI doesn’t get everything right. Those weird English spelling rules confuse the best bots too.

So just suppose you want to improve your spelling, what are the best ways?

• Learn a little bit of Latin or Greek. Ok, you don’t need to learn to speak them, but seeing how a few words go together can show you how to break words you don’t know down into segments. That makes complex words easier to understand, and easier to spell.
• Spelling tests. Do you remember those familiar school spelling tests? There’s a good reason for them. That kind of repetitive practice, learning, and testing works.
• Read a lot, and when you come across a word that you don’t know or can’t spell, look it up and learn it.
• Writing words on a page, comparing them to similar words, and visualising the letter patterns over and over can help to stick an awkward word in your memory.
• And remember the old spelling rules – they can help a lot.

Or if you don’t fancy that? Ask AI or your friendly human dictionary 😊

Does spelling still matter? What do you think?