The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [85]
We were finding things that fit the rules, like “scalion” for scallion, “puding” for pudding, and “occassions” for occasions. Double-letter problems ran amok, but even they couldn’t compete with the vowel confusion, including “braclets” for bracelets, “absolutly” for absolutely, and “lemonaide” for lemonade. It’s easy to see the pattern now, even sticking to the ones we found in March, the pool of data from which Benjamin drew his conclusions. Vowel trouble and double letters. “Absolutly” and “braclets” together indicate a second category, along with my first real find, “referal” for referral. Both types of difficulties would often take place at the junction between a root word and a suffix. The larger pattern into which these pieces fit, however, was an impression that the speller operated by guesswork. If these words were botched in defiance of their own phonetic logic, then what was the principle that guided the speller? There wasn’t one. Many were guessing, as if they’d never been taught to pay attention to the letters while learning to read. When Benjamin stumbled upon a list of often-misspelled words in the 1955 classic Why Johnny Can’t Read, he was shocked to behold that, fifty years later, the book still held predictive validity for our findings on the road. Vowel trouble and double letters ruled the list, and the author, Rudolf Flesch, addressed them directly.
Were students taught to memorize the word lists and not taught how to spell? That’s how I remembered spelling class. We’d use a single set of words each week, then move on to a new set the next week. If you could spell them right on the first day of the week, you’d opt out of having to do that week’s spelling homework; otherwise you’d work with those words over and over. The hope was that the word lists would add up to a vocabulary. Later we’d get vocabulary words plucked from whatever books we read in English class, and thinking about the vocabulary words made me consider those spelling words from another angle. The idea of vocabulary words had been to teach you words you didn’t know, definitions and all. Felicitous, incessant, and everyone’s favorite word from Siddhartha: courtesan. But I knew what most of the words in my spelling book meant by the time I saw them. It was rare for the spelling book to add any words to your spoken vocabulary. The purpose was what it claimed: to teach you how to spell those words. Except that there’d been one simple oversight in methodology. There was no instruction toward teaching anyone how to spell the words. You just memorized them.
Oral language is a natural process, and the written correspondence has to be taught. When it comes to knowing words, children have budding oral lexicons that get a head start on the written. If we want to get kids spelling, reading, and writing, we have to teach them with a system of acquisition. We need to help them translate between the oral system they already possess and the written system. Looking back at the mistakes we’d found pointed to rules of spelling mechanics that hadn’t been firmly planted in the spellers’ minds. A doubled consonant makes the preceding vowel short, which might have been a helpful hint with “scalion” and “puding”. More than helpful, it should have ruled out a double s in “occassions,” which has a long a. Then there’s the silent e, which sits after a consonant and makes the vowel preceding that consonant a long vowel, or, as teachers might explain it, the silent e “makes the vowel say its name.” Hence the long a sound in brace or bracelets. I suppose I’d known these things on some level, with words like hope and hop, which became hoped and hopped, respectively. I couldn’t remember explicitly learning about it. Then Benjamin had returned, carrying notes he’d taken from crawling through a segment of the library. While he might be a Hippie in dismissing complaints about “the degradation of the language,” he did believe some helpful, basic facts had been missed by the methods that schools had their teachers using.
“They can’t handle the junction,” he’d said, back