No comment.

LabRat

There's my comment.

MS Word has a little thing called spellchek.

It's really not that hard to use, guys.

He should be ashamed to call himself an educator.

Um, yeah...

Ay hef no eyedea wat to say aboud this.

Perhaps he's trying to get flamed? Or, no, wait, I know. He's just trying to make his life easier by not having to correct the papers.

Funny question. If those words get misspelled all the time, would it be permissible for him to post a list of common mistakes and tell his students if he finds more than one of those in a paper, he will hand it back for resubmission, with all the consequences of the student possibly missing his deadline?

Michael

That sounds good to me, Michael. I try as hard as I can to make certain that my spelling is correct. Sometimes spellcheck isn't enough, but whenever I'm in doubt I refer to that archaic device called a "dictionary"-- something this guy's students apparently never heard of.

Creative spelling --

Nan

I've been a poor speller all my life - I bless the little cotton socks of whoever invented the spellchecker every day - but I would never have appreciated having my mistakes ignored. If no one tells you where you're going wrong, how will you ever learn?

Sadly, this is part of a terrible trend in the UK, where there's been a growing tendency among education professionals to let standards slide. We had a vast upset recently when a company which had been given the government contract to mark exam papers botched the entire thing. That lead to the most horrendous stories in the papers - like the teacher who was so disgusted she sent in two examples of English exams. One was beautifully literate, spelt correctly and grammatically perfect throughout. The other was full of grammar and spelling errors and made little sense. Guess which one was awarded the higher mark?

Only recently, too, a question in Parliament queried the low standard of questions in a science exam. One question was "What area of the body does a horse rider's hat protect?" And that was a difficult one! And then the government claims that there's been no dumbing down of exams and it's sheer co-incidence that something like 90% of kids are getting top exam marks.

On a similar note, Stuart - after shaking his head in disgust at this Professor - mentioned how he'd been looking over the application forms which potential recruits to the Fire Brigade had filled in recently. Many of them were filled in using textspeak.

is right, Rona! Makes you despair.

LabRat

A lot of the spelling mistakes I deal with are students spelling words the way they read them in books (usually printed in the US with American spellings).

However, In Canada we use a combinaton of British spellings, American and French.

Heres a chart to keep it straight:
http://www3.telus.net/linguisticsissues/BritishCanadianAmerican.htm

we use
metre for meter
centre for center
calibre for caliber
cheque for check
colour for color
enrol for enroll
favour for favor

do you see the major differences? (so be kind when you beta a Canadian Writer!) I try to edit what I type here, but I can't promise to always use the American spelling. I already don't always use the correct form in my everyday life.

It's going to be bad enough with txt english, all lower case since no one can find the cap key.
Pretty soon they will petition that math be up to the user too. Of course, with the US banking crises, they may have already been doing that.

Artemis

I see that as actual legitimate regional differences in spelling. It's no different than regional dialects, in my opinion. There's a big difference between allowing a misspelled word to get by because you're tired of correcting it and actually having a different spelling that is correct. You've provided excellent examples of the differences between just Canadian and American English. But the professor who wants to ignore atrocities such as "misspelt" is a disgrace to the educational system. I don't even pronounce a "t" when I say "misspelled" out loud (although, I don't know if other accents do create a "t" in the word).

This is just another example of how each generation is more and more focused on just "getting by" instead of actually learning. Where do we draw the line?

Okay, I'm getting off my soapbox before I get really worked up.

- Rona, the professional student, who is currently working on an English degree, and is actually part of one of those younger generations that she can't stand.

Hmmm. Thread wander alert! I don't think I correct non-American spellings of English. Or I try not to, because those spellings are valid I think. Do you guys when you beta?

What irks me are careless mistakes in formal stuff. For example stuff like "thier" should not be in something submitted for a grade. Seriously, if your term paper has those red squiggly lines and it's not a specialized term, etc, you really should have taken the two seconds it takes to spellcheck.

alcyone

I'm not saying I correct regional spellings, but my teachers used to mark up our papers if we had American spellings instead of Canadian.

I will mark it wrong, of course, on a spelling test (I teach grade three, or at least will be finally this fall).

Desiree

I always ask the writer that very question: Should I correct English spellings to American spellings? Because even if writer B has lived in Middlesex all of his or her life, Lois and Clark lived and worked in the US. If an author has Lois saying "Too right" or Clark moving a lorry away from an accident, that's going to get flagged. But unless I've gotten the high sign from the writer to correct English spelling to American, I'm not going to flag "flavour" or "metre" or such.

It bugs the fire out of me, but I manfully resist.

Um, 'misspelt' is a correct spelling, by the grounds you yourself allow to be legitimate: it is a British English spelling. -t is a way of forming past tense in British English:

- knelt
- spelt
- dwelt
- spoilt
- learnt
- burnt
- spelt
- smelt

For further evidence, you might like to check this entry .


Wendy

As one who still uses British English spelling though I now live in North America (Canada, where British English is almost entirely the correct form, yet US English creeps into the written language), I strongly support the author's right to use whatever spelling is their preference, though I completely agree that dialogue choice, colloquialisms and cultural references need to be appropriate for the fandom - and that's something I tried to do when I wrote L&C fic.

Now that I write in a British fandom, I'm regularly asked to 'Britpick' by American writers. I always ask if they want me to identify spelling differences, because not everyone wants to conform to British spelling; however, they do want to know if having a character say 'gotten', or 'fixed dinner', or describing distances in 'blocks', is wrong. I can't 'hear' spelling (as in, correct but regionally inappropriate), but I can 'hear' culturally-inappropriate language.


Wendy

When I beta or GE, I always try to find out if the writer wants to use British or English spellings and so correct accordingly. I’m not sure I think it’s good practice to use both in the same story. But then I tend to always use behaviour instead of behavior but thank goodness my spell checker catches it...


I wouldn’t worry about that smileyd. You shouldn’t feel that you have to use American spellings on the board. Use what you are comfortable with. You also shouldn’t feel that you have to use American spellings in fanfic either. Again, use what you are comfortable with - just try to be consistent. I’m pretty sure most people on this board are fine with either spelling.

It all depends on which base you use, doesn’t it? Isn’t it a good thing that the world has managed to get it together so that everyone uses base 10 - 23 means two 10’s and 3 ones therefore you write 23, but in base 5 you wouldn’t write ‘23’. It would four 5’s plus 3 ones therefore you’d write 43. And what if we all used base 2 (binary) like computers use? (23 in binary is: 10111.) :rolleyes:


Nope. See above...


That’s what I do, too. What I’ve recently found interesting though is that some Americans are starting to use ‘flat’ for an apartment. Very curious indeed.


I’m glad you said that because I was thinking it was a correct alternate, too, and was beginning to think my spelling skills had gone off the deep end. That would have been bad since I’ve always been a very good speller. I use my spellcheck but usually what it finds it mistyping. At work, I frequently use the word: appropriately. And for some reason I nearly always have to back space to correct it because I spell it: approrpiately. I drive myself nuts with that. Another common one that I often see medical folks mistyping is: patient. ‘Patinet’ is often typed instead.


Very interesting thread.

That's very good to hear.

The reason I watch what I write though is partly because of the year I spent in Maine (for my ed degree), and partly (okay, mostly) because at some point I wrote on an online board (not LnC), and my post was "corrected" by another poster. I have to say, it peed me off that someone felt the need to do that. It's not like I use many (or any, I think), regional sayings, or that my spelling was unreadable. I felt alienated, and haven't really posted anything else there in quite some time.

So it's nice to know the folks who are folcs are more understanding of differences in spelling around this marble we call home.

Desiree

I'm adding to your horrible list the death of punctuation. I giggle at my source, but I was reading this month's Cosmo, and one of the little factoids talked about people ditching punctuation marks in the digital world. I think I'll hide under a pile of periods and hope they don't get us, too.

Oy.
JD

The trouble with accepting bad spelling is that there are all too many fields (chemical engineering and medicine, for example) where a spelling error or a mistake of a letter or two can result in injuries or death.

Wendy, that's why I said I didn't know if it was legitimate in another form of English or not. You have to realize, where I live, people drop first and last letters of words, and change sounds to sound gangsta-thug and be cool. It irks me, because I find nothing cool about gangs. I think it's more in the way they pronounce it though, because I see nothing "gangsta" about British English.

So, thank you for pointing out it is a correct spelling in the UK. I'm not familiar enough with other forms of English to know all of the differences. It would definitely be an incorrect spelling here in America, though.

Official policy on regional spelling from the Archive is that an author is quite entitled to use their own regional spelling if they want to. The only thing we like to see is consistency. If I was beta reading or GEing a story, I'd certainly point out that an author was using colour one minute and color the next and ask them to pick one or the other and run with it.

I think phrasing though is a different matter. Especially when it comes to dialogue. At a personal level, I always like to get the phrasing to match the characters and location of the show I'm writing for. So I would appreciate an American pointing out that LNC would never say 'fortnight', for example and try to remember not to use it again.

But, again, whether to go with that kind of accuracy or just use your own regional phrasing in the mouths of characters is pretty much an individual author choice. If I saw that kind of thing while editing I'd point it out, but if the author didn't care that would be up to them. I don't think the fandom has any fast and firm rules on that one. Certainly, the Archive doesn't.

LabRat

On the message boards, I think variants are fabulous. I love learning the ways other people say things and it adds a lot of colo(u)r and flavo(u)r to the posts. Nitpicking someone's spelling on a message board is pretty obnoxious.

In fanfic, I can skim past "centre" or "colour" but some others are more jarring. Once, someone wrote about Lois's jeep pulling away from the "kerb" and that pulled me right out of the story. The meaning's obvious and I *think* that's the correct Brit spelling, but it was different enough to stick out.

As for accepting misspellings or txtspeak in college papers... Rage, rage against the dying of the light...

PJ