- Home
- Commentary
- A new ‘creative’ writing wrinkle may be just around the corner
A new ‘creative’ writing wrinkle may be just around the corner
- By Richard Burger
- Published 08/20/2008
- Commentary
- Unrated
Hey, did you hear about the college professor in Great Britain who has come up with a solution to the inability of college students to spell?
He says there are about 20 words that are consistently misspelled in the papers his students turn in, which he has to correct year after year, and it’s a nuisance. So, rather than putting up with all that bother, he’s suggesting that the misspelled words should just be accepted as “variant spellings.”
Certainly it is true that variant spellings are in use in some circles. People who like to send text messages have developed spellings of words that include a mixture of letters and numbers and they seem to communicate well enough. Of course, the messages do have their limitations.
“Wht r u doing 2 nite” works pretty well for lining up a date. But what if you want to use some words that are a little trickier?
What about homonyms? Words that sound the same but are spelled differently and mean different things. The first examples that come to mind, and which include one of the words that is causing the British professor grief, is “their,” “there,” and “they’re.”
His students swap the “e” and “i” in “their.” I suppose you could legitimately say of his students, “They’re there with their ‘thier’ often misspelled. Clearly, however, you could not say it – or at least not write it – if you don’t know how to spell each of the three.
When I brought up the subject in a conversation with my son, who is, by the way, entering a creative-writing master’s degree program in a few days, he sided with the British prof. My son’s rationale, if I recall it correctly, was that English is somewhat of a mongrelized language anyway, made up from a lot of different other languages, and the spelling of its words became codified rather arbitrarily. So, he reasoned, what difference does it make if someone spells “truly” with or without the “e” between the “u” and the “l,” as long as the meaning of the word isn’t compromised.
When he said that, the first thing that came to mind was, the difference it makes is that I had to learn all that arbitrary spelling, so
why the heck shouldn’t everybody else? Yes, I realize that learning to spell words in English is often simply a matter of memorization because of that arbitrariness. But so what? You have to memorize other stuff, too. Like multiplication tables.
But when I suggested to my son that if you allowed variant spellings, why should you not allow variant answers to seven times eight, he scoffed at the notion, and responded that I knew perfectly well why. I’m not sure I do, but that may be because I like English a lot better than I do math.
I will acknowledge, though, that if the guys who were working on the math it took to make a lunar landing had applied those formulas to a “roket” rather than a “rocket,” it would not have had nearly the negative consequences that calculations based on the assumption that six times nine is 55 would have.
Still, I think I have too much emotional investment in “correct” spellings, arbitrary or not, to cave in to variants, regardless of what the professor in Great Britain does. Since my son will be teaching underclassmen while he’s working on his master’s I’ll be interested to see how he grades their papers when it comes to spelling. Maybe creative writing will take on a slightly new creative wrinkle. But I hope not.
He says there are about 20 words that are consistently misspelled in the papers his students turn in, which he has to correct year after year, and it’s a nuisance. So, rather than putting up with all that bother, he’s suggesting that the misspelled words should just be accepted as “variant spellings.”
Certainly it is true that variant spellings are in use in some circles. People who like to send text messages have developed spellings of words that include a mixture of letters and numbers and they seem to communicate well enough. Of course, the messages do have their limitations.
“Wht r u doing 2 nite” works pretty well for lining up a date. But what if you want to use some words that are a little trickier?
What about homonyms? Words that sound the same but are spelled differently and mean different things. The first examples that come to mind, and which include one of the words that is causing the British professor grief, is “their,” “there,” and “they’re.”
His students swap the “e” and “i” in “their.” I suppose you could legitimately say of his students, “They’re there with their ‘thier’ often misspelled. Clearly, however, you could not say it – or at least not write it – if you don’t know how to spell each of the three.
When I brought up the subject in a conversation with my son, who is, by the way, entering a creative-writing master’s degree program in a few days, he sided with the British prof. My son’s rationale, if I recall it correctly, was that English is somewhat of a mongrelized language anyway, made up from a lot of different other languages, and the spelling of its words became codified rather arbitrarily. So, he reasoned, what difference does it make if someone spells “truly” with or without the “e” between the “u” and the “l,” as long as the meaning of the word isn’t compromised.
When he said that, the first thing that came to mind was, the difference it makes is that I had to learn all that arbitrary spelling, so
why the heck shouldn’t everybody else? Yes, I realize that learning to spell words in English is often simply a matter of memorization because of that arbitrariness. But so what? You have to memorize other stuff, too. Like multiplication tables.
But when I suggested to my son that if you allowed variant spellings, why should you not allow variant answers to seven times eight, he scoffed at the notion, and responded that I knew perfectly well why. I’m not sure I do, but that may be because I like English a lot better than I do math.
I will acknowledge, though, that if the guys who were working on the math it took to make a lunar landing had applied those formulas to a “roket” rather than a “rocket,” it would not have had nearly the negative consequences that calculations based on the assumption that six times nine is 55 would have.
Still, I think I have too much emotional investment in “correct” spellings, arbitrary or not, to cave in to variants, regardless of what the professor in Great Britain does. Since my son will be teaching underclassmen while he’s working on his master’s I’ll be interested to see how he grades their papers when it comes to spelling. Maybe creative writing will take on a slightly new creative wrinkle. But I hope not.