Official Spelling Champ

Yellow text on black and red crest-like symbol with white trim on blue background.

The English Spelling Society (TESS) states that English spelling is “probably the most irregular of all alphabetic systems” because you can’t always tell how to spell a word from hearing it and you can’t always be sure how to say a word by the way it’s written. For example: there, there, thare, their (Bell, 2011).

Poor spelling prevents people from “becoming competent readers or spellers, with devastating effects on their lives.”  It “reduce[s] their employment prospects and exclude[s] them from the mainstream of life.”  According to TESS, “learning to read and write English would be much easier and less time-consuming if its spelling were more consistent, but people are either not aware of it or choose to ignore it” (English Spelling Society). 

With the invention of text messaging, we may be doomed. That’s just Gr8.