Perhaps you're going to tell us if it was good enough for Chaucer, it's good enough for you?

You would think with these days of spell-check on our oomputers that there would be far less spelling mistakes on this site for one.

If I see the word 'loosing' instead of ' losing' on anyone's post again, I will scream!

Do you feel like loosing the hounds Suse?

As someone who's never had any trouble with spelling from my earliest days of learning to write, I have often puzzled at the struggles that some people have.

The mnemonic aid I've most relied on is etymology, not in the sense of having an encyclopedic knowledge of Greek and Latin roots, but in the sense of trying to understand how the words have evolved over time through usage. To take up JKJ's comment, Chaucer is pretty impenetrable in the original text, but it's not that hard to follow the evolution from his time, when English as she is spoke was not at all standardised to ours when it's globally comprehensible despite regional variations.

It seems to me that this gives the words context and a greater life than mere rote learning of rules. Etymology has long been a preoccupation of lexicographers and linguists, but it seems not to be of much interest to modern teachers.

The Online Etymology Dictionary www.etymonline.com offers a very simple and approachable jumping off point which I try to encourage my own kids to use.

Don't be unkind Suse.

It is probably some slooow old fart haaaas just gooot a new keyboard that's toooo quick fooor them.

Craig I think you will find a lot more people are slightly dyslexic than is realised, & this is the problem. I know I am, & only discovered it in my 30s.

It was only when I started sailing single handed around the big nasty ocean, navigating by the old sextant & tables that I found out. I could easily occasionally transpose 12345 to 12435 when copying from the tables, & then repeat the mistake when checking my workings. I could even do it a number of times. It was like a mental block. I only saw what I expected to see.

As such a mistake could be deadly when passing a reef in the middle of the Coral Sea, I had to develop a coping mechanism. When I felt a position was wrong, or a position was critical to a couple of miles, after a thousand at sea, I would rework the sight, using a different assumed position. This would mean I was working with a different set of figures, so could not duplicate the same mistake.

Today people trust a bit of electronic equipment that has spent often years in a salt & sea air environment to tell them where they are. Dyslexic & all I could not do that. The thing only has to be wrong once, the last time you read it, just before you hit the coral.

As for spelling, wotz that. I can proof read something a number of times & not see a couple of letters transposed, or even one repeated.

Yes Haz and well said. AQnd faat fingerrs are alsoo a problemm!
Yesterday I cudent even spell univercity student, now I are one.
Rhrosty

Craig is brilliant if he could use etymology to help him spell when he was less than nine years old. Most people cannot.

OZIDEAS, etymology is about the story of the words. Kids love stories.

Hasbeen, I've never used a sextant, but I know how it's done in theory and I've done a bit of surveying. It must be hard on a small yacht.

Your point on dyslexia/dysnumia is a good one, but it raises a question about how it would be adaptive for such a trait to be prevalent in the population. In other words, is there some characteristic of processing vision that simultaneously makes it hard to properly process letters or numbers and makes the person better at something that would have been useful to an ancestral human?

I think most people do not appreciate just how irregular English spelling is (as shown on my EnglishSpellingProblems blog), how much harder it makes learning to read and write and how easily it could be improved. Nearly all English spelling patterns have some exceptions (78 out of the 84 main ones), but the worst retardants of reading and writing progress of young children are a mere five:

irregular spellings for short vowels in 213 common words
(plaid, said, busy, was, other ...
cf. mad, bed, dizzy, wont, upper....),

597 omitted doubled consonants after short vowels (radish, refuge, lily, copy, study....)
and 219 words with surplus doubling (effect)
which undermine the 503 words with sensible doubling (ladder, effort, silly, poppy, buddy)
and make a nonsense of consonant doubling before suffixes (e.g. big + er = bigger).

205 surplus -e endings (have, delicate, masculine, promise...) which undermine the
1000+ words with a useful vowel-lengthening -e (save, inflate, define, surprise...);

452 unpredictable spellings for /ee/ ( speech - speak, shriek, eke, seize, marine...)
and
437 unpredictably used 'o-e' and 'o' (troll, stole, old, coal, bowl, mould ... no, show, toe, though, sew...).

Those five irregularities are particularly nasty because they don't merely cause much word by word rote-learning of spellings. They make learning to read English much harder than need be too with their many irregular letter sounds, as in 'said, busy, other, have' which undermine the main patterns (e.g. laid, bus, often, save).

The first three are also closely connected. They all help to wreck the English system for spelling long short and long vowels, as in 'fat, fate, fatten'. Making them more rule-governed would already shorten the time needed for learning to read and write English very considerably.

The 336 variants for 'e' in the unstressed endings -en/ -ence/ -ent and –er
(flatten, presence, present, father
- abandon, ignorance, ignorant, doctor, grammar...).
pose no reading difficulties, but are of no help to anything either.

Reducing any of the 5 above inconsistencies would merely tidy up some of the spelling messes thoughtlessly left to us centuries ago.

Reading difficulties come in different shapes and sizes. I have recently been working with an eight year old who is doing reasonably well with sight words but is still badly stuck with phonics. He can sound out H-A-D but struggles to put it together as HAD. Spelling reform will do nothing for him. It seems that spelling reform is based on an assumption that phonics are easy for everyone. It also overlooks schwa, which is the most common sound in English, and cannot cope with different pronunciation of words. For example, which of the following should prevail - missile or (US) missl, laboratory or (US) labratory. How does spelling reform cope with territ'ry (hello schwa!) versus terri-tory?

Speaking of Spellcheck,

"Owed To A Spell Check R"

I have a grate spell chequer,
It came wit my PC
it plane lye marks for my revue
Miss takes i can knot sea
I've run this poem threw it
i'm shore yaw pleased two no,
Its letter perfect inn it's weigh
My checquer tolled me sew.

Candide should read the articl.