ABSTRACT
Matters of language, and particularly spelling, are a perennial topic for discussion. Governments, employers, the person next door, all have opinions on spelling and very often, even if they are not conventionally accurate spellers themselves, they usually feel that ‘this generation’ doesn’t spell as well as their own. This isn’t the place to try to analyse this remarkable phenomenon, except to say that the secretarial features of writing offer an obvious target. Even experienced teachers of writing find that their eyes almost automatically home in to errors in spelling and punctuation. The extent to which a writer lures the reader into a piece, the careful unfolding of character or a clever use of persuasive technique are far less easy to talk about than spelling or punctuation. Whether because of its surface obviousness as a part
of writing, or the idiosyncracy of the English spelling system, for many years spelling has mainly been taught as a separate element in the curriculum. And despite all the drilling, tests, repetition, ‘write out 100 times’, there are still problems in getting accurate spelling to stick – with some people, at least.
