[greymule]

It is true that if you have the first letter, the rest of the word has to be pretty badly botched before it's unrecognizable, especially when it's in context. The previous post is clever proof of that.

Unfortunately, such findings led many schools to teach reading by the "whole word" or "look-say" method, with disastrous results, both for comprehension and for spelling. Thus the "back to phonics" movement.

There is today a (much smaller) movement to recast every word phonetically so that it is spelled exactly as it sounds. Of course, this would create other problems. Paragraphs written with such spelling are easier for people with poor reading skills, but they are murderously hard for normal readers.

When I taught high school in the early 1970s, many kids (almost all of whom had been taught by the look-say method) were helpless when it came to spelling even the most basic words. How a kid gets to 18 years old and writes "sevan dayes a wheek," I don't know. Maybe the University of West Virginia ended up teaching him to spell better. One played "defen savin" on the school football team (and went on to play big-time college football). Another wrote that he was going to visit "Yomain" (the state north of Colorado). Many kids could not correct their own obvious misspellings. I remember that one had spelled "suicide" as "suidice" but couldn't see what was wrong, even though she could pronounce the word correctly.

By the way, this was in a suburban high school with a low murder rate.

Interesting that the insistence on correct spelling is fairly recent. Read documents written by, for example, President Andrew Jackson, and you see that spelling didn't seem to matter back then. In Shakespeare's time, spelling was practically arbitrary. However, the codification of spelling (and grammar) helped English become practically universally established. When an Iranian airliner lands in Russia, the pilot and tower communicate in English. More people speak English in the Far East than in North America.

Fair or not, misspellings cause many readers to lose respect for the writer. I know of companies that, in reviewing resumes, start by tossing out the ones with misspellings.