Americans Can't Spell Anymore

Nowadays, people's competence in English spelling is very poor, at least to judge from what I see people writing in online chat rooms and so forth. No one knows the difference between your and you're. There's also ignorance of the differences among to/too/two, there/their/they're, and even then/than. Hardly anyone, anymore, respects the distinction between it's and its. (This problem, or mistake, has become well-nigh universal.)

Some of these things are not new. I very well remember, when I was teaching college freshman English, some 40 years ago, writing (over and over and over) on student themes, "It's = it is." And it seems no one knows, anymore, how to spell a plural possessive (no, it's not the same as the singular possessive).

To my mind, the blame for this situation rests squarely with teachers. Decades ago (but after I was in school), teachers adopted a philosophy of allowing students to write with no correction or criticism of "mechanics" by the teachers—because it was thought that requiring students to pay attention to mechanics would distract them from expressing themselves and stifle their creativity.

This is part of a larger phenomenon of what is wrong with education. Teachers (and "educationists," those educators with Ed.D. degrees) want to turn all learning into a game and have enormous dread, and avoidance, of ever having to tell their pupils that something must simply be learned by applying a little effort. All out of (to my mind) an exaggerated fear of stifling the kids' fragile little psyches. Maybe this is why, according to many measures, America's kids can't keep up with those in some other countries.

However, if everybody begins to write your when they mean you are, I don't really believe that will mean the end of the world is upon us. Because of my linguistic training, I know that orthography (spelling) is arbitrary, to a degree--with English orthography being more arbitrary than that of many other languages. To spell or write homonyms the same or differently is not going to matter a great deal—unless maybe you want to worry about whether, at some future time, people won't be able to read older literature anymore. Maybe today's authors will be as hard to read, in the future, as Chaucer or even Shakespeare is for us today.

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein