Damn.
"Like the rest of the posters..."
Too much coffee, or not enough?
I am, to this day, indignant at a system that used me as a stick to beat kids who couldn't spell if their lives depended on it.
Yes! Yes! So many smart, well-read, accomplished people drag around a burden of secret shame because they're not so hot at spelling. Whenever I encounter such a person, I always mention that pattern-recognition study. And now that I've made my deadline, I have no excuse for not digging up the details.
Like the rest of the poster, I'm definitely a write-it-down speller. A few other things I've noticed about the writing/seeing factor:
95 When I was in grad school, the persistent and promiscuous errors in my freshman-English students' papers wore down my own spelling immune system; I found myself using "it's" for "its," and having to really think about how to spell "weird." Mortifying.
95 Spoken words that I can't visualize 97 very unusual names, or anything beyond my working vocabulary in a foreign language 97 completely flummox me. I've learned to ask for the spelling of the name or the word; otherwise, the sounds just skitter across the surface of my brain and refuse to attach themselves to any kind of meaning.
95 I'm near-sighted, in the glasses-for-movies-and-driving category, and due to a combo of vanity and absent-mindedness, I rarely wear glasses except when in the theater or behind the wheel. Shortly after I moved to NYC, I was walking up Second Avenue when I spotted a restaurant sign across the street: Human Baloney. Disconcerting yet intriguing 97 proof that I wasn't in Kansas anymore! (In the t-shirt-slogan sense; I've never even been to Kansas. An oversight, I assure proud Kansans, not a value judgment.) Upon closer inspection, the restaurant's name turned out to be "Hunan Balcony." But for the rest of the day (and, off and on, through the years since), I thought about that chimerical restaurant called Human Baloney. How is it decorated? What does it serve? Is it filled with self-consciously depraved downtowners? Does Page Six cover the antics of nubile hotties canoodling on its banquettes? Could it become the next McDonalds? Myopic dada such as "Human Baloney" has turned out to be one of the enduring, if minor, pleasures of living in New York.
The mind is a strange thing.
Indeed.
A study done a few years ago (by someone, somewhere) seemed to indicate that spelling ability may be a matter of wiring as much as cognition. Apparently, good spellers don't memorize correct letter-combinations but instead match up the written words against a mental library of word-patterns. This ability seems to be inborn; you can develop reasonably good spelling through rote learning but if you don't have the pattern-recognition knack, you'd best give up any dreams of a lucrative and glamorous proofreading career.
Speaking as a state spelling-bee champeen and compulsive proofreader, this makes sense to me. Words either look right or they don't. Plus, how else could anyone master the limitless illogic and inconsistency of English spelling?
I'd fossick about online and find the study but I've been indulging in a bit of deadline-avoidance and now the waters of guilt are washing over the levee of procrastination and I must get back to work now, dammit.
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