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.)