Spelling

 Subject: Spelling

A friend reminded me yesterday that my spelling needed improvement. He is an ex-Grammar School chap who's school life disciplined him into being taught English by having his head being filled with complex rules which define the language. The rules are important in that they set the parameters and people are then corralled in a way to understand the written word which then makes the understanding universal. Without the rules, interpretation would be a riot of conjecture and supposition.

The correct spelling of a word is just one of many rules which sometimes terrorise people'.Less thought is given to a controversial view or an  attempt at poetic symbolism, never mind the emotion or the search for truth, the important thing is the spelling.

Ok I make mistakes regarding spelling. Some of it induced by the spell checker’s interpretation of the word it thinks I want t use but  its also my lifelong struggle with dyslexia, that jumble of letters with no form or formula. Reading a book is where you normally pick up vocabulary but unfortunately I read a bit like the spell checker, casting my eye over a sentence to define meaning, the sentence, much like an individual word is stored away to use later.   The meaning of the sentence gives me the comprehension of an individual word in a sort of fact checking way but unfortunately putting the cart before the horse this relegates individual spelling a mystery since I never learnt the symmetry of of a word how it is spelts or the rules guiding the way it is spelt. Similarly with grammar, any understanding of the language comes from hours of difficult reading in which the form (the sentence) rather than the particular (the word) is digested.

The components of a sentence, its grammar and syntax it's context plus it's spelling are all technicalities which I never grasped, or for that matter, was ever taught and whilst I would argue that subject matter is much more important than syntax  there are many who would disagree and who am I to object.