Poor spellers, lousy teachers

Ken Smith may be only a teacher of criminology, but his ideas are truly criminal:

Fed up with his students' complete inability to spell common English correctly, a British academic has suggested it may be time to accept "variant spellings" as legitimate.

Rather than grammarians getting in a huff about "argument" being spelled "arguement" or "opportunity" as "opertunity," why not accept anything that's phonetically (fonetickly?) correct as long as it can be understood?

"Teaching a large first-year course at a British university, I am fed up with correcting my students' atrocious spelling," Ken Smith, a criminology lecturer at Bucks New University, wrote in the Times Higher Education Supplement.

This is absolutely the wrong thing to do. Besides, as John Simpson, the chief editor of the Oxford Dictionary, explains, rules are there for a reason, and he does not agree with accommodating university students' poor spelling skills because, according to him, they should have learned how to spell by the time they reach university.

This sad story also proves something I have been saying all along: As a society, we're constantly giving in to perversion in all aspects of life, with normalcy being marginalized more and more all the time.

I know, though, what really motivates Smith. He is a lazy and lousy teacher who doesn't want to do the work he's paid for. By accepting bad spelling and not marking papers accordingly, he wants to take a shortcut bypassing his duties as an educator. That is the real reason.

Comments

[Scott Horne]

Quite simply, people who cannot spell ordinary words correctly don't belong in a university. I have neither the time nor the patience for mollycoddling.

But I've even heard self-styled translators deny that they should be expected to spell correctly. (And they don't.)

[Richard Benham]

Of course spelling is important. However, I do agree with the criminologist in one respect: he should not have to correct students' spelling. As Scott says, if you can't spell simple words, you shouldn't be there.

It is easy enough to blame the schools, but this does not excuse the individual. It is within the ability of any person of reasonable intelligence who is not afflicted with some brain disorder to learn to spell, with or without the help of a teacher. These days, it is a trivial exercise to look up a word on an online dictionary if you are not sure of its spelling.

I would recommend the following policy for universities: any work submitted with more than a small number of typos should simply be rejected. We all make typos (even Scott), and sometimes even spell-checkers don't pick them up because we have accidentally written another word. (I leave aside the question of spell-checkers that try to enforce incorrect rules.) But "opertunity" is not a typo: it's a token of arrogant contempt for the English language and for one's readers.

In Australia, there was a big stink a few years ago about a related issue: some universities were instructing their academics to accept any old crap from overseas students, and concentrate on the "content". The pecuniary interest is obvious: overseas students pay inflated fees. However, I reject the form/content distinction in these cases, because when the spelling and grammar are bad enough, the content can only be guessed at. Sometimes these guys actually say the opposite of what they mean. Does this mean they should always be given the benefit of the doubt? Apart from this, there is another small issue: one of the chief reasons non-English-speaking students aspire to degrees from English-speaking universities is as proof of their linguistic competence in English. So giving degrees to people who do not master the language just because they pay exorbitant (or should I follow the trend and write "exhorbitant"?) fees is simply corrupt.

BTW, I am currently writing a mémoire in French, and I sincerely hope no allowances will be made for my non-native status its assessment.

[Scott Horne]

I'm perfectly willing to accept the fact that non-native speakers of a language will practically never achieve complete native competence. It is therefore unfair to expect them to achieve that uttainable goal. So I'd say that a few minor infelicities should be tolerated in non-native writing. Your [i]mémoire[/i], Richard, is likely to contain some of these, and I'm sure that they will be overlooked.

But I don't think that bad writing from either native or non-native speakers should be tolerated in universities. People who cannot use the language effectively in writing should be told to improve their skills before applying for admission to a university.

I do make typos, yes—but very few, and I usually catch them. Ever since I started translating on a freelance basis, I have offered my clients a partial refund for any typos or other errors that are found in my work. The offer continues to stand.

[Richard Benham]

It's true that anything I write in a language other than English is likely to contain some infelicities. Moreover, some of these will mark me as a non-native. However, none of this stops the quality of my writing in French being at or above the level required for a native speaker to pass. Have you read a few native-speaker dissertations in English?

[Werner Patels]

Heck, just look at the stuff Canadian journalists hand in every day. Most of them don't even know the difference between "that" and "than" (a very common and oft-repeated mistake in Canadian newspapers).

The editor-in-chief of Canada's oldest and national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, for example, can't tell the difference between "undo" and "undue", and since the spellchecker doesn't catch a mistake like that, every time people read his columns, his poor command of the English language stares them right in the face -- and he's the editor-in-chief!

[Scott Horne]

I used to think that anglophones were the worst spellers. I was wrong: this dubious distinction goes to the francophones. So rare is correctly written French that it actually draws my attention.

[Werner Patels]

Scott, have you seen my entry from a few months ago?