Spelling poll

["Charles P. Campbell" <cpc -at- MAILHOST -dot- NMT -dot- EDU>]

Thanks to all of you who responded, often passionately, to the
question of whether spelling really matters any more.  Frankly,
I'd rather hoped it did, and your replies gave lots of good arguments
in favor of correct spelling.

Despite the invitation to reply addressed early in my message to
those who don't think spelling important enough to discuss, nobody
who replied thinks spelling unimportant.  Probably I raised the
question in the wrong forum to hear from the spelling-indifferent.

The immediate impetus for the poll was an article in the business
section of the morning newspaper that managed to use principle/
principal _and_ soul/sole interchangeably _in the same paragraph_.
I see such confusions all the time in the public print, and their
prevalence suggests to me that there may be something going on
besides laziness, poor teaching, and so on.  Then that same morning
I noticed _in this very forum_ several people writing about having
taught or studied "grammer" (Kelsey the actor?), people who almost
certainly know better.

Here, spelling problems often result from having to use clumsy
text editors, or using a mail program that lacks one.  I'm  writing
this on an emacs editor from the mail program over a modem-to-service
-to-university connection that delays
the visible response to keystrokes up to 10 seconds. A correctly
spelled message will be something of a miracle.

As a student of the history of writing technologies, influenced by
scholars such as I.J. Gelb, Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, and
Walter J. Ong, I wonder whether we aren't undergoing another revision
in our basic orientation to language comparable to those brought about
by alphabetic writing and fixed type in their eras.

Writing, Ong has argued, became a commodity with movable type.  Printed
matter evoked a certain reverence--anything appearing in type had
a certain authority about it.

Now, writing lacks that solidity.  In forums like this one, letters
formed by pixels of light have a certain evanescence that reinforces
the disposability of the messages posted here.  Outside of cyberspace,
stuff that's flushed has to turn up somewhere downstream, but not
here.  Email messages are the ultimate metaphor for the disposable
society.

Despite the cosmic futility of spelling correctly in messages doomed
to the un-ness of cyberspace, I think I'll continue to counsel the
editing class to watch their spelling.  In fact, I think I'll use
your replies as an exercise in whole document editing, the results
to be posted here. (Give us a few weeks.)















































































=================================================================
Chuck Campbell, PhD                                   cpc -at- nmt -dot- edu
Technical Communication Program                      505-835-5284
Humanities Department, New Mexico Tech
Socorro, NM 87801
=================================================================
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."
        --Samuel Johnson, 5 April 1776