I Love to Write but I Can't Spell

This will be extremely difficult for me.  I’m not even sure this is article-worthy.  I’m going to use a lot of big words where monosyllabic words will suffice, and probably improve the quality.  And I’m going to do this without my essential writing first-aid, my beloved dictionary.  You see, I can’t spell.  My co-workers constantly give me that eyebrow-cocked-up look, or make fun of me outright, because my desk is littered with dictionary, thesaurus, grammar guide, etc.  I am flipping through one of these books every 20 seconds.  Checking, rechecking, always verifying my best-guess spelling choices. As a result, my work is perfect.  Often boring, but always perfect.  And I’ve got quite the reputation of being a word nerd, grammar geek, schoolmarm type.  Little do they know.

Here is the challenge I have given myself.  I will not use a single writing aid while writing this article.  I will even turn off the spell-check device for this article.  And I can’t think of anything more daunting than exposing my ignorance and grammatical screw-ups to all of you accomplished writers.

I somehow associate the ability to spell, or at least the childhood chore of learning to spell, with the third grade.  For me, in my Catholic school education, third grade is the grade I remember as the start of serious spelling activity.  The little I do remember of it is unpleasant.  More to the point is that I remember so few of the spelling rules that I assume all my fellow third graders learned.  I must have been absent, home with my chronic ear infections, for much of third grade.  Spelling and math just didn’t exist.  And sadly, for the rest of my grade school and high school life, I was always playing catch-up, and not doing a great job of it.  By the time I hit college, I had accepted the sad fact that I did not inherit the spelling gene.  And several other education specialty genes, if truth be told.

I vaguely remember one teacher telling us students that you can always determine how to correctly spell a word if you will just learn how to listen.  Listen to how the word is pronounced. 

Yeah, like that worked.

My relatives on my mother’s side are all German immigrant farmers.  My mother did not learn to speak English till she was in the sixth grade.  So every family reunion was filled with all these aunts, uncles, and cousins speaking German or heavily accented English.

My relatives on my fathers side are … well they’re a lot of things.  French, Russian, English, and other cultures thrown in, just to keep things interesting.  They spread out and settled in Tennessee and Mississippi, Louisiana I think, and Texas.  So with this group, you’ve got whatever accent(s) native to their culture, softened up with a lovely southern lilt, then twanged up with a Texas drawl.

Add to that the reality of growing up in San Antonio, TX.  All of my school chums spoke with a Mexican accent.  It was Mexican when we were kids.  The word Hispanic had not yet been invented.  And if everyone talked that way, no matter what your last name or your skin color, then that’s what you heard.  And that’s what you learned.

So I concentrated on listening, just as Sister Roberta, Sister Dorothy, Sister Imelda, Sister Clare, Sister Ida, etc. instructed.  And I spelled what I heard.  And it was never right.

Add to that the unhappy reality that I could not seem to remember all the tricks to spelling.  I knew there was the ‘I before E’ thing, but somehow I never got the rest of that rule.  I had no idea what a long E was.  And the ‘el’ ‘le’ conundrum was enough to make me cry.  And who among us has memorized every word that uses ‘ence’ vs. ‘ance’?   And who can hear the subtle difference between ‘able’ and ible’?   And is there a rule to guide the choice between ‘er’ and ‘or’?  And this doesn’t even scratch the surface of the big brick wall of spelling stuff that I don’t know.

This was how it was for me.  I had accepted the shamful reality that I would never be a speller.  With this cross to bare (and I’m dying to do a quick dictionary search to confirm if that should be ‘bare’ or ‘bear’), it was ridiculous to ever dream of a career in writing.  So what was God thinking when He gifted me with the knack for grammar?  I could literally hear it, even as a kid.  I could hear the correct word choice.  Almost like a mathematical formula, I could immediately decipher if the subject and verb were in agreement.  I credit Sister Longoria in the sixth grade and her months and months of sentence diagrams on the chalk board for my ability to literally see the grammar rules wrapping around the words of a sentence as it came out of someone’s mouth.  Too bad really, because this odd knack served no purpose in my life for all the years I  was gaining my education. 

My knack and my inability finally found a partnership of sorts when I was hired as an office manager in an education department in a university setting.  One of my low-level grunt jobs was proofing the faculty’s writings.  With a death-like grip on my dictionary, I flipped through page after page to ensure that these learned individuals never had a spelling faux pas.  It was second nature for me to correct their grammar and improve their writing flow while I was at it.  This startled and sort of unnerved these educators at first.  Apparently, no one had ever challenged their writing styles.  Personally, I think no one had ever cared about their writing styles.  When more of their articles were being published, they grudgingly accepted my oversight of their writing.  It was very flattering when I overheard a couple of faculty agree that they wouldn’t think of submitting an article to a journal without first letting me re-write it.  That’s right, the guy actually said the word ‘re-write’, and the other guy agreed.  I felt like I had accomplished something unbelievably beyond my scope.

But I still was chained to my dictionary.  I had not become more knowledgeable of spelling rules.  Then another wonderful thing happened.  Well, it was not wonderful at the time.  Apparently, my boss disliked spelling as much as I did.  Oh, he never said as much.  God forbid he would admit such a thing.  But one day he shouted out to me, “How do you spell _____?”  I can’t even remember the word.  It doesn’t matter.  I grabbed my dictionary, luckily found the word in just seconds, and shouted back the correct spelling.  And the pattern began.  This became a quick and easy habit between boss and assistant.  Some days it wouldn’t happen at all.  Some days when we were writing, it could happen easily a hundred times or more.  Our offices connected so all that shouting was just speaking loudly.  I would hear the requested word, look up the spelling, and shout it back.  Always I would verify the spelling in the dictionary.  And eventually, I began to realize something.  I was correctly spelling the word in my head and finding it in the dictionary was a confirmation of my spelling guess.  I was actually getting better at spelling.

I can’t say that I was learning rules but I was seeing the word, correctly spelled.  I was seeing it, reading it, and spelling it out loud.  This happened over and over, on a daily basis, for years.  I think maybe I memorized the spelling of words.  Or maybe I memorized how sounds would be spelled.  I still feel unsure in spelling sounds that are so similar.  I’ll never be able to differentiate between ‘el’ and ‘le’, except for the spellings that I have memorized.

Then I realized another interesting thing.  After I shouted out the correct spelling, I would take a few seconds to read the definition.  It was no big deal, no more than three seconds.  But my vocabulary began to improve.  It was that basic.  Read the dictionary and improve your vocabulary.  Now no one is going to sit down and actually read a dictionary page by page.  But I did start looking up any and every word that I had even the slightest question about when I read the newspaper.  I thought this would be annoying and distracting to the smooth reading of a news item but just the opposite was true.  It was no effort to train my brain to wait the few seconds it took to confirm the exact meaning of a word, and then continue reading.  And the amazing result was that I better understood what I had just read.  And I remembered it better.  Probably because it all made better sense to me when I understood every word.

I discovered my most recent spelling aid accidentally.  It had been many years since I had done a crossword puzzle.  I had found them fun but not addictive.  Then one weekend I did the crossword puzzle in the Sunday paper.  The difference is that I did it with dictionary in hand.  It was an amazing experience.  I originally used the dictionary to confirm spelling of words, and then I realized that I was looking up the definition of words I had never heard.  It didn’t bother me at all if I had to wait a whole week to get the answer to a particularly difficult word.  My vocabulary was expanding in ways I had never anticipated.  So I had used the dictionary to help me finish the crossword puzzle.  An ultimately I was doing the crossword puzzle to read the dictionary.

I have a lot of dictionaries.  Not to give me choices; of course they’re all the same.  But I keep a dictionary at every place I will read or write.  And I seem to go through a lot of dictionaries.  I get the paperback for my convenience and they usually fall apart after about a year of abusive handling.  But it is well worth the sacrifice of a book (I love books) in return for what I have learned.  And for the self-esteem I have gained in joining the world of spellers.  So that’s the article.  It’s not great, but it was about ten years in the making.  My apologies for any misspellings.