Poll: does spelling matter?

Subject: Poll: does spelling matter?
From: "Charles P. Campbell" <cpc -at- MAILHOST -dot- NMT -dot- EDU>
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 1994 09:54:22 -0600

If you think spelling is an issue too unimportant to discuss on this
list, would you please drop me a line saying so?

Seriously, I'm interested in questions like the following:

Is spelling obsolete?
Do different visual forms of words that sound
the same carry any actual semantic distinction any more?
Should spelling be taught to youngsters?
Should professional technical communicators know how to spell?

You may think that these questions aren't very important, and you
may be right. Maybe spelling is no longer a valuable skill. If
that's true, let's find out. Then we could accept with equanimity
whatever spellings our electronic spellcheckers suggest, secure in
the knowledge our readers neither know nor care about the distinc-
tions made by different spellings.

If you'll drop me a line with agree-disagree answers to the following
questions, I'll post the results on the list. Please feel free to
include additional commentary.

1. Professional technical communicators should know how to spell.

2. Spelling is less important now than it used to be; meaning
is carried by the sound of words, even when they are read,
rather than by their visual form (i.e., the letters that evoke
them on page or screen).

3. It is important to learn spelling and etymology because the
visual form of words contains important information about
the formation of the culture now using the words.

4. Noah Webster and George Bernard Shaw were right: we oughta
simplify spelling so there aren't so many rules and excep-
tions.

5. The following passage of text seems OK to me:

Benny's grammer teacher tolled a funny storey about a man
who is the soul owner of a shoe company. He had invested
his principle in a process to embed springs in the shoe
soles, but found the rate of return on his principal to
be less elastic than the souls. (Inspired by an article in
the business section of today's paper.)

This bit of empirical research will hardly pass muster as science,
of course, but it'll help me decide whether to cane students in the
editing class who consistently misspell words, or whether to rein-
force their self-esteem whenever they approximate known words. ;->


=================================================================
Chuck Campbell, PhD cpc -at- nmt -dot- edu
Technical Communication Program 505-835-5284
Humanities Department, New Mexico Tech
Socorro, NM 87801
=================================================================
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."
--Samuel Johnson, 5 April 1776


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