The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [86]
Hortense from Miracle on Main Street came to mind once more. Wasn’t the problem she’d had with the dictionary the same problem that everyone seemed to be having with spelling? She had the dictionary right there, but she hadn’t been taught how to use it. Teach kids to use a dictionary and give them the basic construction of phonics, and they ought to be able to spell most of the words they can say.* Once they actually get reading, the engine turns over, and they begin acquiring words both from conversation and from what they see on paper. We could give them the proverbial fishing pole rather than carping on lists of words. Otherwise, it’ll all depend on what you can cram. In that case, I guess I’d have to thank my parents for a great verbal memory.
I thought back to the dozens of spelling mistakes I’d seen along the way. We’re all using way more words than anyone can simply memorize. I suppose if you hold yourself to a limited vocabulary, you ought to be able to remember how to spell all the words you use, right? Or, if there’s no dictionary handy, you should avoid writing a note to someone that uses words you can’t recall, effectively making your written representation slightly less well versed than your spoken self. Those were my half-hallucinatory thoughts as I finally drifted off to sleep. I dreamed of classrooms with rows and rows of students, all taking a spelling test on the contents of the entire dictionary. Some students looked harried as they tried to remember the words and keep up with the monotonous teacher-voice listing the words; others had given up. I saw one little girl coloring a picture. She smiled up at me and said that the teacher won’t mark her off as long as her paper looks pretty. Another kid was repeating tricks he’d learned for spelling individual words: “Wed-nes-day, Oh, see the ocean, desert is barren and only has one s but dessert is yummy and has two of them, there’s a rat in separate, Feb-ru-ary …”
“Isn’t this the information age?” I shouted. “What’s the point of memorizing the whole dictionary?” My words echoed pointlessly on through the scholastic corridors of my nightmare.
TYPO TRIP TALLY
Total found: 358
Total corrected: 192
* Said Holmes in his first recorded mystery, A Study in Scarlet : “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order.”
* See chapter 16.
* Name has been changed to protect the irrational.
* Dealing with the exception words is typically the last part of phonics instruction.
16 | How Do You Deal?
May 11–16, 2008 (Albany, NY, to Manchester, NH)
Comedy or Tragedy, ’tis sometimes difficult to see when one lives the Play. Though in sight of familiar territory, the Journey nearly at its end, still the unwavering armies of error must be beaten back. From an Albany Fair, through the very Knowledge Halls wherein the idea of TEAL has its faintest beginnings, and at last into our Hero’s stomping grounds of yore, astonishingly varied responses muddle the Duo.