I am and have always been a horrible speller, but really it’s English’s fault. I mean why the heck does PH make an F sound? What is wrong with Wednesday? Why isn’t it spelled Whensday or more like Wensday because why the heck are their silent Hs in words like When in the first place? English is just stupid.
Anyway let me tell you about some of my struggles with spelling.
In elementary school we had spelling tests all the time. I remember in like 5th grade the teacher’s strategy for spelling tests was that you would get quizzed on the words the very first time they were introduced to you. So you’d have no idea what the words were going to be and you’d have to just hope for the best that you knew how to spell them.
Luckily these quizzes were not graded, because I would have failed all of them. You see the teacher would have us first take the quiz before getting the chance to study and then if you miraculously got all the words right then you wouldn’t have to take the quiz again latter and could just chill while everyone else took it. My one genius friend didn’t have to take the quizzes pretty much every time. I was so jealous especially since I couldn’t even pass at all.
Another problem with this system was that I had these quizzes with horribly misspelled words and then we would go over them and write the corrections on the quiz next to our failed attempts and that would be our sheet to study with. You might wonder why that’d be a problem. Well the thing is, I’m the type of person who always does better studying when I get someone else to quiz me, and this inevitably meant I had to show my failed spelling attempts to one of my family members.
My family made fun of me so bad for my terrible spelling. One of the examples of how I spelled something that I still vividly remember because of the extent of the ridicule I had to endure was the word Echo. The way I spelled it was Ecow. I distinctly remember my sisters and my mom who were all the mostly likely to people to help me study cackling and saying, “Eeeee Cow!”
My sisters enjoyed helping me, because of the opportunity to laugh at my spelling. I would bring home a spelling quiz and they would be like, “Oooh I want to see it.” It was like some super exciting and entertaining thing for them which of course was a bit annoying for me at times, though for the most part I thought it was funny too.
My one sister Jess, I distinctly remember would do practice quizzes to help me study. So she’d read out the word the way the teacher would and I’d write it down on a piece of paper and then she’d correct it. Well my sister’s corrections were unorthodox to say the least. She would draw angry faces when I got the answer right and sad faces when I got them wrong. Yep. None of the faces where positive and she’d write silly mean comments like, “Britty is smelly” on them.
Now you might be thinking, “Oh that poor Brittany girl! Her family is so mean,” but you are so wrong. When my sister did this to my quiz I remember we both died laughing. I of course questioned the face system and why the correct answers were so angry and my sister told me that it was because the spelling wasn’t funny when the answers were right. It was a fun little game where she would be the evil teacher and I would pretend to be the hurt and terrified student. It made spelling so much more fun.
The moral of the story is that even if your family is pretty weird and makes fun of you like mine it’s just cus they love you and also it makes you a better person. Life is way less fun when you can’t take being the butt of a joke. Also hey they're helping you study so be grateful and stop your complaining.
A second somewhat nerdy moral comes from the fact that I’m actually so much better at spelling than I used to be and that largely comes from the fact that I read a lot. So that’s moral number two. If you want to get a little better at spelling, just become a big nerd like me and read bunches.
The third and final moral is that if you’re bad at spelling, it doesn’t really matter that much because odds are most of your writing is typing these days and with that there is spell check so you no longer need to be great at spelling just good enough for your computer to be able to fix it.