Learn to spell, please

I can’t spell. Hopefully it has not been very evident in my blog
posts, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is. It’s something I’ve never
been able to do. I blame it on elementary school when they told me
to “just sound it out, it’s better than not writing anything.” Well, I
still do. And it can come out very wrong. Spell check doesn’t help me.
Sure it can often identify the words I’ve spelled wrong, but usually
I’m so far off that the suggestions it has are not the right word, or
it doesn’t even have a good suggestion for me.

My mom accuses me of having ruined her spelling over the years. She says she’s seen words
spelled wrong so many times by me she can’t remember what the correct way is. Some of her favorites of my commonly misspelled words are “tomorrow” and “rough.” Tomorrow I always spelled tommorow, forgetting which letter was double, and rough was a problem of mispronunciation too… I spelled it “ruft.” My mother discovered that one after she was helping me edit a “ruft draft” of an English paper.

One word I still can’t spell is expirience. Good chance it will still be wrong
in this post since it’s another one the spell check is baffled by.
I admit to “dumbing down” my vocabulary in text messages or gchats
since it takes too long to look up the spelling of the complicated
word I would have said if talking face to face.

My aunt used to tell me to look up words I didn’t know in the
dictionary. Is that a joke? A good way of babysitting– keeping me turning pages for hours since inevitably I started with the wrong letter.

In college, I confess, I used the method of instant messaging my friend
Lee asking him how to spell a word correctly. Of course he would never
know what the word was I had sent him and I’d have to use it in a
sentence first. When I visited him in China he didn’t want me trying
to teach anyone English since he figured I would teach misspellings.
And it’s true, I never liked helping my French cousins with their
English homework, I wouldn’t know the answers either. But that was
mainly grammar… and that’s another story.

One time on an English paper I tried to write that something was “in
tatters” but apparently I wrote “taters” and my English teacher (I’m
pretty sure I got an A on it regardless) wrote “what some kids call
potatoes! you meant tatters…”

Anyway, long story long, I had a spelling incident on the phones at
work. In my customer service phone job I was trying to spell something
in a case file for a customer. And I had to spell the word
“essential.” Apparently I didn’t know any of the correct letters in
that word. The phone call went like this:
me: “ok ecc”
cust: “no ess”
me: “right ecci”
cust: “no essen”
me: “of course essens”
cust: “no”
me: “c?”
cust “NO TIAL…” then in a much put upon voice “why don’t you read
that back to me”
I wanted to defend myself, I really did, send her an A paper of mine,
send her my transcript, but of course I couldn’t do anything like
that. So instead I know she’s probably retelling her friends about the
complete idiot she was talking to on the phone…”I guess they don’t
have any standards for hiring people these days!”