Books, Children and Spelling

[oloriel]

Why oh why are children (almost) always incapable of writing in books? Whenever they show you something supposedly written by a child in a book, the orthography is horrendous. As though there's some secret rule that all children must, by nature, suck at spelling. Why? I mean, I'm aware that I may not be the norm, but I for my part never had any trouble with orthography. I never saw any point in spelling bees (still don't, in fact, but that's for different reasons now) because you just knew how things were spelled, didn't you? I didn't know the word "innate" back then, but I always wrote like "I felt was right", and in fact, it always was right. I hated the stupid "tricks" we had to use in the lower grades to check our spelling (there were four! FOUR! steps of controlling one's spelling, beginning with comparing the word one just wrote to the original in the textbook and ending with writing it with your finger into the air (and I still don't know what that's supposed to be good for), which we occasionally ALL had to take - even when we were just copying words down - instead of just writing). I suppose that's because I began devouring books as soon as I could read, so the "correct" spelling (along with a network of technical terms, complicated words and interesting syntactical structures, but that's a different topic) was implanted in my brain right from the beginning, so I guess it's fair to assume that children who don't read that much may have more trouble with spelling, but still. It should also be fair to assume that not all kids - especially not once they've passed beyond the earliest writing age, and actually like reading and writing - are half dyslexic. Honestly. They aren't.

(I mean, really. If I take a look at my elementary school essays or at the first stories I wrote back when I was 7 and wanted to become another Astrid Lindgren, or the "newspaper articles" I wrote in play, then yes, the plot/content ranges from simple to ridiculous, and the characters are either cut-out, stolen or Mary Sues, but at least the Erudamn spelling is perfect. Bah.)

Comments

[inkandalchemy.livejournal.com]

Amen to that!! The one and only spelling mistake I EVER made in grade school (and yes, it still irks me to this day) was in second grade when I wrote "orange" as "onange" because we had only just learned to write in cursive and I drew my "r" incorrectly.

[flower-star.livejournal.com]

You really were taught tricks to check your spelling? I somehow don't remember anything like that - but a lot of my class mates would have needed it.
I didn't, though - same as you, I never had a problem with spelling. I don't know if it's because of the reading or because of some natural talent, but most of the time people with a natural talent for languages tend to read a lot, anyway.

[ladylaurelote.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear.

[conuly]

I had some serious problems spelling English when I was little, and I read a lot. All the time, in fact, so long as I was awake :)

And so did a lot of people I knew. Indeed, so do some adults I know today!

English spelling is messed up, seriously - so I don't find "messedup" spelling to be all bad when reading something a child character is supposed to be written, unless it's *very* messed up for the kid's age and there's nothing "wrong" with them that leads to that (dyslexia or whatnot).

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Ok, you have a point with English spelling there. But then, it happens in books in languages that have a more regular spelling (German or French, for instance) as well, all the time. And not only those translated from the English.
And I still refuse to believe that all kids are bad at spelling, even with the heap of chaos that is English orthography.

[conuly]

French has a good word to pronunciation correlation, but any one word can be spelled so many ways, it's not even funny. You can read what's written, but can you write it down again?

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Yes, I can. I think words lodge themselves in my brain in a fairly useful combination of meaning, sound and spelling all in one link. I was genuinely confused as a kid when people just couldn't write words - if you knew what the word was, and what it meant, you knew what it looked like, didn't you? It always worked that way for me, and of course, I thought that was natural...

[conuly]

I meant that generally rather than you, oroiel, but that's still good to know :)

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Aaaah. Sorry, then. I thought you were asking me in particular. *fails*

[conuly]

*giggles*

It's still useful information. You're Oloriel, the insta-spell-check!

[vashachu.livejournal.com]

I teach 7 and 8 year olds and I very rarely see a piece of work with zero spelling errors. (As in a piece of writing...most students do an excellent job on spelling tests, but have a hard time carrying it over to everyday writing. But at someone mentioned earlier, English is a hard language when it comes to spelling. The words only follow phonetic spellings or phonetic rules 50% of the time.

But, I'm with you about finding it easy to spell. I would have college professors throw out words and as a challenge "See if you can spell that!" and I would, with very little effort. *shrugs* Just came easily. Now geometry on the other hand...;)

[conuly]

Of course, the longer a word is, the more likely that it follows easily recognized rules. Short words are the ones that follow no rules that man may tell.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Most of them do, actually; but I'll admit that those are way to complicated for kids. ;)

[dawn_felagund]

I recall being a good speller also; I always got A's in it! I wonder: Do you think that children using computers more has taken the focus off of spelling a bit? Programs like MS Word have AutoCorrect and just about everything has spellcheck these days. I know that my spelling has suffered because I use Word for all of my writing except that which is immediately destined for the Internet--like LJ entries--that I do in WordPad, and having AutoCorrect doesn't force me to learn to spell properly. It just does it for me. I don't know how often kids use computers these days, but I know it's a lot more than we did when I was in school...and we certainly didn't have AutoCorrect or even spellcheck! (In fact, some of my first computer activities were spelling games! :^P)

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Quite possibly. If kids only "consume" language that corrects itself without actually having to stop and think about the correct spelling, that may contribute to more sloppy spelling. Then again, I don't know whether kids actually use Word or similar programs much; I suspect they use the computer for playing games rather ;)

And still, the phenomenon is there even in books written and playing before the Microsoft era...