Over my dead body

English spelling is under fire once again. Apparently students at Universities are writing “thier”, “ignor” and “arguement” (and obviously don't know how to use a spell checker to correct their mistakes).

According to Ken Smith, an academic at Bucks New University, we should now tolerate variant spellings. He claims that students are incapable of learning the spellings of “their” and “truly”. His answer is to change our attitudes to spelling to help this deserving minority.

English spelling does have a system. The silent “e” in “tone” shows that the preceding “o” is long; the lack of “e” in “ton” show the “o” is short. And so on with all the other vowels: “Dane/Dan”, “pin/pine” etc. In order to understand , children need to be taught the rules of English spelling, not folk myths about “i” before “e”, which at best affects 11 common words.

Of course there are anomalies, like the 11 ways of pronouncing the letter “a” - “age”, “bad”, “bath” (note for my southern readers the "a" here is short as in "bat"), “about”, “beat”, “many”, “aisle”, “coat”, “ball”, “beauty” and “cauliflower”. The most common problem for many though is the consonant doubling rules of English - “embarrass”, “accommodate”, “desiccate”. I'm afraid you just have to learn those.

If we followed the latest suggestion and made, for example, the spelling of “they're”, “there” and “their” interchangeable then reading would be impossible. The three forms have different meanings which help us to see the structure of the sentences they are contained in. Also spelling makes distinctions that are impossible in speech, such as “whole” versus “hole” or “beech” versus “beach”.

Learning to spell in English is hard but not impossible. Constructing meaningful sentences is far more difficult!