ABSTRACT
Interest in the English writing system can be viewed as a reaction to the presence or absence of change. The recent burst of interest in the system has undoubtedly been a response to the changes, over the last generation, in how and where printed writing is produced. No longer is it regulated almost exclusively by the house styles of printers and publishers; it now exists in the deregulated written domains of the internet, computer-mediated communication, advertising and elsewhere. In short, the middleman has been removed from much writing, spelling has been freed up and a creative explosion has occurred, documented here by Lauren Squires (Chapter 27) and Tim Shortis (Chapter 28), who also shows how many seemingly new forms have been recycled from the margins of ‘vernacular’ spelling.
