Spelling Trouble for Many of Us

By JOHNATHON E. BRIGGS

April 16, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

What’s in a word?

For Vice President Al Gore, the answer last week was potential embarrassment on the presidential campaign trail.

That may explain why, during a Columbus, Ohio, campaign stop Tuesday at Avondale Elementary School, Gore stayed mum while a group of first-graders and their teacher struggled to spell “sincerely” on a piece of paper. In full view of the national press corps, and without Gore’s help, they spelled it “sincerly.”

The last time a vice president tackled spelling, he flubbed “potato” in front of a classroom and a nation. With cameras rolling in 1992, Dan Quayle insisted that the name of the vegetable ended with an E. He instantly became the butt of late-night talk show jokes.

But he is hardly alone. When it comes to spelling, we’re not all on the same page.

Even Einstein and Edison Made Mistakes

Albert Einstein couldn’t do it. Although the eminent scientist taught at Princeton and reinterpreted the world’s concept of time and space, he frequently made spelling and grammatical blunders.

Light bulb inventor Thomas Edison wasn’t a hotshot either. The letters he wrote to his mother when he was 19 displayed appalling spelling slip-ups.

And Andrew Jackson, seventh president of the United States, was such a pitiful speller that he once said: “It’s a damn poor mind that can spell a word only one way.”

One in every five Americans struggles with stringing together the right letters because of how their brains work, say experts. And for the other 80%, the blame for chronic misspelling has been placed on everything from the media to computer spell-checks and the whole-language approach to education.

Yet overall, said one authority, there’s a common thread running through America’s waywardness with words: Laziness.

“Blame poor spelling habits,” said J. Richard Gentry, author of “Spel . . . Is a Four-Letter Word” and “My Kid Can’t Spell!”

“Good spelling is like getting up and brushing your teeth,” the educator and researcher said. “No matter if you’re naturally a good speller or happen to be a struggling speller, you have to develop good habits.”

Which is not easy to do when people are bombarded by advertising messages that indicate “it’s OK to spell any old way you want to,” said Carolyn Andrews, a Virginia native and “word list manager” for the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee, a contest her son won in 1994 before she was hired.

Andrews said she gets agitated when she sees neon signs for “Krispy Kreme” doughnuts, rather than “Crispy Cream.” She gets upset with “nite” on sleep medicine packages. And she ain’t “got milk,” but will respond to “Do you have milk?”

“We’re bombarded with misspellings and incorrect grammar,” said Andrews, adding that over time it’s had an effect. As proof, she cites “I Wrote You Word,” a collection of Civil War letters written by her husband’s great-great-grandfather. He was a tobacco farmer who spelled “dissipated” and “exemplary” perfectly.

“People back then could spell,” Andrews said. “Now, people are not disciplined to be good spellers. We’ve given them permission to be lazy about it.”

Surveys seem to support her claim. In 1955, the Gallup International Spelling Survey found that a sample of 1,000 Americans misspelled five out of 10 words on a spelling quiz. In a 1989 retest, they misspelled six. They did worse than Australians (three misspellings), Canadians (four) and the British (five).

The quiz included words like “kerosene,” “calamity” and “parallel.” It also had two of the all-time stumpers: “penitentiary” and “picnicking.” The best spellers were ages 34 to 44; the worst were 18 to 24.

That’s no surprise to Marlon Evans, assistant director of undergraduate admissions at Stanford University. For the last two years, he’s been helping to screen the 18,000 applications sent in by high school students eager to enroll at the prestigious campus.

One student recently spelled “Stanford” wrong, he said, but most of the mistakes are confusion among words, as with “their,” “there” and “they’re.”

Worse yet is when a teacher’s recommendation is riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, Evans added. “What can we expect from the student if the teacher is making these mistakes?”

And some mistakes are glaring even in the earliest grades. Several years ago, teachers at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in Sacramento sent home a note announcing that a local sports star would be appearing in class to urge students to do their “personnel best.”

Evans blames computer spell-checks for America’s sloppy spelling.

“With spell-check, you just have to know what it sounds like and get close. You could go through your whole life getting close,” he said.

In Defense of Computer Checks

But researcher Gentry disagrees, calling the notion a myth. He asserts that computer spell-checks actually make people better spellers.

“It gets you in the habit of checking your spelling,” said Gentry, who argues that the Internet can improve our spelling habits. “If you want to use a search engine, you’re not going to find it if you don’t spell it right.”

Everybody’s favorite whipping boy has been the whole-language approach to literacy: the theory that educators should lighten up on phonics and spelling drills and allow children to enjoy literature for the fun of it. That way, the theory held, students would absorb sentence structure and grammar almost by osmosis.

Rong. It didn’t work, and educators shifted back to the basics. That’s why Betty Sweet’s ninth-grade English class at Jefferson High School in South-Central Los Angeles is drilled on 15 spelling words each week--a task that usually elicits a groan.

“Ah, that’s baby stuff,” is a complaint she hears. But Sweet stands firm: “Some of these babies need it.”

Sweet said most of her students are Latinos and were raised speaking Spanish, in which words are generally spelled as they sound. So when she sees them spell “want” as “whant” on homework assignments, she said it isn’t a sign of laziness but a matter of struggling with a second language.

Scientists say it may be a matter of physiology that students literally cannot hear some individual sounds that make up English words. For instance, many native Japanese speakers cannot distinguish between “light” and “right” because their language makes no distinction between the sounds of R and L.

“If your brain has not acoustically heard the difference between ‘light’ and ‘right’ and ‘sight,’ it will put them all together and you’ll get confused,” said neuroscientist Paula Tallal of Rutgers University.

Tallal is co-founder of a research company that develops computer software to help students hear phonemes, the sounds in words.

How quickly this happens depends on how fast a person’s brain processes both visual and auditory cues, she said. And in 20% of the population, their brains struggle to process such cues, making reading and spelling a challenge, she said.

In fact, research published last month by experimental psychologist Joel B. Talcott and his colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reinforces the connection between the brain’s processing speed and literacy.

Researchers found that out of a group of 32 normally developed children, those who were the quickest to recognize sounds and follow dots on a computer screen also turned out to be the best readers and spellers.

Regardless of cerebral prowess, few techniques can beat practice and proper instruction when it comes to spelling, said Gentry, known as the “Guru of Spelling.” Demanding that students memorize the spelling of words they won’t use in their writing or speech is a futile exercise, he added.

Gentry recalled when a parent of a fifth-grader told him that her son had to spell “sarcophagus” as part of a thematic unit on Egypt.

“Now when was the last time you wrote sarcophagus?” asked Gentry. Students need to be taught grade-appropriate words they will have to use in their schoolwork, he said.

A compound word list with entries like “applesauce,” “twenty-one” and “post office” might be more relevant, he said, “but memorizing ‘sarcophagus’ is not going to help that child as a speller.”

Although poor spelling does not mean the decline of civilization, it does reflect badly on people, he said.

“Like it or not,” said Gentry, “people judge you by your writing, just as they judge you by what you wear.”

Times staff writer James Gerstenzang contributed to this story.

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Minding Your Ps and Qs

The 25 most commonly misspelled words:

1. Accommodate

2. Choose

3. Effect

4. Controversial

5. Precede

6. Possession