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Spelling "truely atrosious," says academic

LONDON (Reuters) - 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

completely ridiculous. i doubt anyone will listen to this proposal, and hope no one has a similar idea in Portugal.

yeah i dunno, most of my teachers said that they would be marking us on our ideas rather than our spelling. i'm not sure how bad other peoples's are. i assume mine usually have a one or two typos, but if there's people who actually think the words are supposed to be spelled those ways then their essays must be fucked :\

i guess that outside English exams and the like the important part is your ideas and how you get them across, but in a professional context i find it very important to have correct spelling and grammar, otherwise you just come across as being amateurish and doing half-assed work. that's why i think that in examinations there should be some kind of penalty for bad grammar/spelling, even if only a small one.

if i was an english teacher i'd take off multiple points for each spelling error.

i'm sure that sort of policy works wonders.

I think speeling is stuped and teachers who grade us on weather or not we spel words rite with grammer are bad. It shood'nt mater if I spel words rong, becuz pepple can get my ideas and take me seriusly.

WEN WIL AN ASTROFYSISYST NEED TO SPEL WORDS RITE ANYWAY DOGAMMIT

Little oversights here and there are fine, but people should know how to spell "argument" for Christ's sake.

Fucking stupid. Spelling is pretty damn basic and if you can't master it than what does that say about you. Not to mention spell check in Microsoft Word and even Mozilla Firefox has a spell check program.

i mean seriously, accepting phonetic writing? it would suck for an English teacher if every other examination turned in was written like Trainspotting.

Or Huckleberry Finn.

What a dumb idea.

That's fucking ridiculous (despite the fact I had to look up to spell it). My own spelling is pretty bad, at times - that's why I look up words all the time. But allowing it is pretty stupid, not to mention confusing and annoying for the reader.


The next step would be to allow text message spellings.


Taken from some material from an exam rehearsal I had to do during my vacation this summer:

" The vocabulary of texting is highly informal and is not yet regarded as standard English. However, a small sign of that possibility came in 2003 when a 13-year-old Scottish schoolgirl wrote an essay entirely in text message shorthand, schocking her teachers. Her essay began: " My, smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :-@ FTF. ILNY, it's a gr8 plc"

If anybody ever handed in an essay like that to me, I would probably have to smack them.

Trainspotting is the biggest piece of shit I've ever tried to read. I like the story but can't stand the awful phonetic style. It takes three minutes to decipher each page. I strictly stick to watching the movie. Filth is at least tolerable to read.

@ original topic: What is to stop people from just turning essays in written in a different language? The professor could still translate it. Eventually the slang will deteriorate into something that doesn't resemble English at all so why not.

Is anyone else misspelling words more often in the thread talking about misspellings?

Retardedly bad idea.

Reading that hurt my brain. But I agree with the majority with the whole spell stuff properly campaign.

In the context of schooling, getting ideas across is probably the bigger issue, but you know what helps to get ideas across efficiently? Spelling words correctly. Also, hellwhore, is that first image in your signature from Hatchet?

I should have kept count on how many people who commented on it. I believe it is, I found it on a bands myspace, but our dear reviewer Zad said on another thread it's from Hatchet. I'm gonna watch it tonight

Somebody has proposed this here in Quebec, Canada but for the French language, I think this is stupid and proves how much people are simply frigging lazy!

Learn to fucking spell, retards. It's not hard.

Does anyone want to make an argument in favour of it, since we all seem to be mastre spelers?

I fink its eisae to spel, wahts teh porblem?

my only argument for it would be that something like spelling errors shouldnt matter on in-class exams with time limits. or you could argue that by the time you get to university it's more about what you write than how you write it, but i think that works under the assumption the person can spell