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.