Re: general topic of spelling

["Taterwriter" <taterwriter -at- sbcglobal -dot- net>]

I'm going to bypass the specific points in this to make an observation from 
personal experience.  My father used toys to teach me letters starting in 
infancy.  I played with plastic letters while he bathed me, and I used to 
hold them up and he'd tell me what they were.  He got tired of this, and 
started holding them up and asking me what they were.  By the time I was 
three, I was able to read the comic strips, and soon afterward the rest of 
the newspaper as well (though I didn't, of course, understand most of it. 
This was pre-Sesame Street.

The point of all this babbling is that I actually learned a majority of my 
vocabulary from print, starting some three and a half years before first 
grade. Having learned my words visually, I've never had any problem 
spelling, as do those who learned their basic word-hoard via speech.  My 
problem went the other way:  there were words I knew, and could write and 
understand, but couldn't pronounce.

So my personal experience with technical writing as been "Dictionary?  I 
don't need no steenking dictionary".  I'd be interested in hearing from 
others who were early readers   Thanks to an accident, I suffer from nerve 
damage in my left arm so my typing isn't what it was.  When I spot one of my 
typos, which are more and more frequent as time goes on, I feel embarrassed 
because I know I'm making mistakes I shouldn't.


Philip Taterczynski

"Stupid people can't spell. Intelligent people make typographical errors"



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dick Margulis" <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Cc: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2005 19:44 PM
Subject: Re: general topic of spelling