Spelling truly atrocious says academic

[buckthesystem]

http://www.stuff.co.nz/4648458a4560.html

Embaressed by yor spelling? Never you mind.

Fed up with his students' complete inability to spell common English correctly, a British academic has suggested it may be time to accept "variant spellings" as legitimate.

Rather than grammarians getting in a huff about "argument" being spelled "arguement" or "opportunity" as "opertunity," why not accept anything that's phonetically (fonetickly anyone?) correct as long as it can be understood?

"Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I've got a better idea," Ken Smith, a criminology lecturer at Bucks New University, wrote in the Times Higher Education Supplement.

"University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell."

To kickstart his proposal, Smith suggested 10 common misspellings that should immediately be accepted into the pantheon of variants, including "ignor," "occured," "thier," "truely," "speach" and "twelth" (it should be "twelfth").

Then of course there are words like "misspelt" (often spelled "mispelt"), not to mention "varient," a commonly used variant of "variant."

And that doesn't even begin to delve into all the problems English people have with words that use the letters "i" and "e" together, like weird, seize, leisure, foreign and neighbor.

The rhyme "i before e except after c" may be on the lips of every schoolchild in Britain, but that doesn't mean they remember the rule by the time they get to university.

Of course, such proposals have been made in the past. The advent of text messaging turned many students into spelling neanderthals as phrases such as "wot r u doin 2nite?" became socially, if not academically, acceptable.

Despite Smith's suggestion, language mavens are unconvinced. John Simpson, the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, says rules are rules and they are there for good reason.

"There are enormous advantages in having a coherent system of spelling," he told the Times newspaper.

"It makes it easier to communicate. Maybe during a learning phase there is some scope for error, but I would hope that by the time people get to university they have learnt to spell."

Yet even some of Britain's greatest wordsmiths have acknowledged it's a language with irritating quirkiness.

Playwright George Bernard Shaw was fond of pointing out that the word "ghoti" could just as well be pronounced "fish" if you followed common pronunciation: 'gh' as in "tough," 'o' as in "women" and 'ti' as in "nation."

And he was a playright.

[LadyRaven]

Spelling and grammar are part of the heritage of a people (as part of their language).

That is why I use the formats I do, because, before the war that some people call the US Civil War, the South used the 1800s OED spellings with a few distinct variations such as the lack of apostrophe in one syllable contractions (such as dont vs don't). I am an Unreconstructed Southron and the American spellings were part of the reconstruction.

Britain should retain it's traditional spellings and grammar and not make lack of education and sloppiness part of the culture.

[O'Dannyboy]

Spelling and grammar are part of the heritage of a people (as part of their language).

That is why I use the formats I do, because, before the war that some people call the US Civil War, the South used the 1800s OED spellings with a few distinct variations such as the lack of apostrophe in one syllable contractions (such as dont vs don't). I am an Unreconstructed Southron and the American spellings were part of the reconstruction.

Britain should retain it's traditional spellings and grammar and not make lack of education and sloppiness part of the culture.

I agree. This brings me back when some people in the U.S. wanted to teach Ebonics in our public schools. The very idea that anyone would be willing to formally alter a language is simply lazy. I understand that the common language may not equate to English in the formal sense but we do not need to relabel one or the other to simplify things.

[Leonard]

Perhaps we should sponsor a spelling bea........

[glorywatch]

Hooked on fonics werked fer me

[Guest]

[Guest ktn4eg]

I suppose it's because I'm of the "old school," but I would suggest that our universities should strive to maintain a high standard for their students' written assignments.

It's one thing to send text messages or converse in a chat room perhaps, but a written assignment in a university-level class ought to reflect at least some level of good writing.

Unfortunately, we've experienced a general "dumbing down" of education for the past several decades. Thus I imagine that many of the written assignments that students submit are merely a result of their never having been educated in the essentials of good writing in the first place.

[Guest ktn4eg]

& if U cant, U cn gt a bd jb, rite!!

[Rick-Parker]

Another example of the dumbing down of education.

[Guest]

Pretty Kewl If You Axes Me