Bad Spelling: Why?
“It could be a phonics thing.” Sounding it out? What? This does not work for SO many words. Some recent scientific study has shown that teaching children to read phonetically (the sounds of individual letters to build syllables, then syllables to build words) is the most effective method in use in the UK. I learnt to read this way, but many of my friends did not. I think there is a difference today between the approaches I take to reading and spelling words, and the approaches my friends take. To some extent I’d say I was at a huge advantage at reading/spelling new words, but theoretically could have been at a disadvantage at spelling already known words had I not gone on to be a relatively keen reader. Now I wasn’t there when my friends learnt to read, and they don’t seem to recall any particular procedure. My Mother is something of a specialist in child learning and there’s were not. When I encountered a new word if I took a wanton swing at its pronunciation my mother would remind me
I can’t spell. And I suspect there’s some truth to the visual/auditory theory. Recently, I played the lead part in a 2 hour, 45 minute play, in which I talked almost non-stop the whole time. I had to memorize pages and pages of dialogue. I had never played such a huge role before, and I asked my wife for advice about memorizing lines. She’s a very experienced actress who can memorize quickly. She told me she does it by reading the text over and over. When she’s saying the lines, she actually visualizes the words on the page. Sometimes she can even see the page number in her mind. And she can mentally turn the pages. I tried this, but it utterly failed with me. No matter how many times I read the lines ON THE PAGE, they wouldn’t stick in my head. But if I read one sentence and then spoke it aloud 50 times, I would remember it. So that’s how I worked. I would hold one sentence in temporary memory and then put the script down. I would say that sentence 50 times. Then I would move on to th
