Entered on 30 July 2003 at 8:35 a.m..

Spelling

As most of you know I cannot spell to save my life. Over the past few months I have decided my problems are actually much deeper, and that my problems with spelling are just a symptom of a much larger issue. That is that every now and then I lose the meaning of a word entirely. I know the sound of the word, but then my brain goes all funny and I start to think, hang on that cannot really be a word can it? Maybe I've gotten it wrong. This happens fairly infrequently, but it is a very strange experience. It happend most recently with the word "Kentucky". Just look at it. Other less extreme cases of this brain fuzziness occur when I think of a word I want to write, for instance "of" now if I am not concentrating, I usually spell of, o.f. but if I'm thinking about it sometimes I spell it o.v.e. which I know is wrong, but cannot for the life of me figure out why. You see it seems that letters have no meaning for me off the page. If I cannot see something written down whole, I cannot decide if it is right or wrong. Thus, the only way I know if a word is spelled incorrectly is if I look at the whole thing down on paper and something inside my head says, that doesn't look quite right. The voice never says, 'if you sound that out it cannot possibly be right' or anything else constructive.

So for me spell checkers have been a God send. Mostly because they are the best spelling coach I've ever had. They let me spell words the way they flow from my subconcious through my fingers and onto the screen. If they are wrong the spell checker highlights them, and my brain gets better at deciding if something is spelled correctly or not. I'd say that before I came to the UK I was at about a 70% success rate.

However since coming to the UK this syndrome of mine (and make no mistake it will eventually be classified as such) has gotten worse. This is because I am forced to spell things the British way. Now granted that if I were free to use a combination of British and American spellings I'd spell about 90% words correctly. However with my spell checker now re-inforcing the British version this has left my poor brain terribly confused. It has started throwing all kinds of false alerts to any word with a 'z' in it, because the Brits only recently discovered the usefullness of a 'z'. I'm adding u's and o's in all kinds of strange places and sadly I'm afraid I'm down to about 60% of words spelled correctly. Sigh.

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