Saturday, August 22: Mississippi Mud
SPELLBOUND
by John M. Floyd
I sometimes agree to help with or conduct projects — workshops, anthologies, classes, contests, etc. — that involve reading other writers’ stories and making decisions based on (or providing feedback about) the quality of their manuscripts. These experiences have served to remind me of a persistent problem some of us writers seem to have:
We can’t spell.
We can’t seem to punctuate our sentences correctly either, but this spelling thing is what puzzles me the most. How can we grow to adulthood in this country, with our educational system, and still not know a damn thing about spelling the words of our own language? Did we never learn it in the first place?
For what it’s worth, here’s my theory. I don’t think a person’s spelling competence (or incompetence) is based wholly on education, or even intelligence. I think it’s based on whether he reads a lot, and whether he pays attention when he does read.
I don’t know about you, but to spell a word I first have to picture that word in my mind, and see it as if it’s on the page in front of me. (I even have a hard time remembering someone’s name until I hear or see it spelled.) The point is, when you read a lot you become familiar with a huge range of words whether or not you realize it at the time, and that of course makes it easier to later visualize and spell those words when/if the situation requires it. Just another reason that good writers are usually avid readers.
But why worry? one might ask. Can’t I count on my handy electronic spell-checker to rescue me? Not always. I recently heard a good example of that. Apparently, someone had meant to type the two words “does not” in a story manuscript — but what happened was that she put the space in the wrong place, resulting in “doe snot.” Spell Check gave it the once-over, found “doe” and “snot,” recognized both as valid words, and gave the manuscript a thumbs-up. I don’t know the fate of that story after it was submitted, and I’m not saying the editor/publisher/reader rejected it because of that mistake, but I’m sure the error didn’t improve its chances of success. If you write something that turns out to be funny it’s better if it’s intended to be funny. And the terrible thing is, the writer in this case wasn’t necessarily a bad speller. She was just careless.
The solution to that kind of problem is simple: proofread. A big guy with overalls and a bushy beard and a James Earl Jones voice once told me, in a bar in Anchorage, that if you have to shoot a grizzly you shoot him over and over until you’re sure he’s dead, and then — when you’re not just sure but you’re positive that he’s dead — you shoot him again. The same thing applies to proofreading, except it’s a little safer. Check your work until you’re certain it’s okay, and then go over it once more. (As sure as I’m saying this, I’ll probably commit a stupid spelling error in this column and fail to catch it. If so, please do as I say and not as I do.)
I should also mention that spelling errors are not limited to aspiring writers. Here are a couple of notable examples, courtesy of Wikipedia:
- A googol is ten to the hundredth power. The spelling-challenged founders of Google registered their trademark and Internet address before someone pointed out that it was spelled incorrectly.
- Cleveland, Ohio, was named in honor of General Moses Cleaveland, the leader of the crew that surveyed the town. Reportedly, its first newspaper couldn’t fit the city’s name into its masthead without removing an “a.”
I can’t resist listing a few more jewels, although I can’t remember where I saw them:
- Queen Victoria sat on a thorn for more than 60 years.
- This name on the deed is a deceived person.
- Columbus discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic.
- As indicted, I have five years of investment experience.
- My daughter must miss class today due to illness. Please execute her.
So spelling does matter, in everything from employment applications to teachers’ notes. And if you’re a writer and you want to be published . . . well, just remember to read a lot, keep your dictionary close at hand, and watch out for doe snot.
That should dew the job.
By the way. . .
For those folks (both of you) who told me they’re looking forward to the answers to last week’s “locations” quiz, here you go. The following fictional towns are followed by the stories, movies, etc., in which they appeared:
1. Bedford Falls — “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946)
2. Paradise, Massachusetts — The Jesse Stone novels, Robert B. Parker
3. Sparta, Mississippi — “In the Heat of the Night” (1967)
4. Isola — The 87th Precinct novels and stories, Ed McBain
5. Cicely, Alaska — “Northern Exposure”
6. St. Mary Mead — The Miss Marple short stories and novels, Agatha Christie
7. Greenbow, Alabama — “Forrest Gump” (1994)
8. Fernwood, Ohio — “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman”
9. Derry, Maine — It, Insomnia, and other novels, Stephen King
10. Bayport — The Hardy Boys mysteries
11. Amity, Massachusetts — Jaws, Peter Benchley
12. Hadleyville — “High Noon” (1952)
13. Rock Ridge — “Blazing Saddles” (1974)
14. Hogsmeade — The Harry Potter novels, J. K. Rowling
15. Hill Valley, California — “Back to the Future” (1985)
16. Gibbsville, Pennsylvania — Short stories and novels, John O’Hara
17. Rivendell — The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
18. Hooterville — “Petticoat Junction”
19. River City, Iowa — “The Music Man” (1962)
20. Bedrock — “The Flintstones”
21. Cabot Cove, Maine — “Murder, She Wrote”
22. Wineburg, Ohio — The George Willard short stories, Sherwood Anderson
23. Santa Teresa, California — The Kinsey Millhone mysteries, Sue Grafton
24. Mayfield — “Leave It to Beaver”
25. Clanton, Mississippi — Several of John Grisham’s novels
26. North Fork — “The Rifleman”
27. Haddonfield, Illinois — “Halloween” (1978)
28. Desperation, Nevada — Desperation, Stephen King
29. Zion — “The Matrix” movies
30. Maycomb, Alabama — To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Speaking of spell check, there is a good program Spell Check Anywhere (SpellCheckAnywhere.Net) it adds spell check to all programs.
One trick I’ve learned to catch spelling errors is to print the story out and then proof read it. I can see the errors better on paper than on the screen.
I think the younger people can’t spell because they were taught to spell phonetically instead of using rules and memorization. Not that I can complain, I do the same thing but use my dictionary more than the spell-checker to make corrections.
I agree with Sandra. I find editing on paper essential not only for catching spelling errors, but for finding omitted words. A journalist friend’s trick for fool-proof editing is to read the piece aloud.
My wife (like myself) is an attorney. We both worked for executive branch agencies of the government. As any government attorney knows, briefs filed with various courts on behalf of the United States are prepared by the Department of Justice. They (often a bit grudgingly) forward to briefs in draft form for agency attorneys to review.
Some years back a colleague of my wife received a brief arguing that a certain agency program, challenged before the court, was in fact fully in the “public interest.” This argument was made numerous times throughout the brief. The only problem was that each time the Justice Department attorney had in fact typed “pubic interest.” Not only did the agency attorney correct the spelling, he also accessed the dictionary of every attorney’s computer and removed the word “pubic” from the list of correctly spelled words. The reasoning was that it’s not that “pubic” isn’t a correctly spelled word, it’s rather that there is something to be said for a computer that flags the word for you every time you use it — just to make sure!
My problem is with words I use every day. Occurred: one C, two Rs, or two Cs or — oh, get out the book for the thousandth time. There are about a dozen of them.
After covering the criminal courts for years I could never be sure about “judgement” or “judgment” even if I had typed it an hour earlier.
One day I was stopped by a weatherbeaten woman studying the directory at the courthouse. “Can you tell me where the persecutor’s office is?” She couldn’t find it listed, but the more I thought about it the more I wondered if it shouldn’t have been there.
I think that a lot of it comes from the fact that so many people are using computers now.
Back when I did all of my writing on a manual typewriter, I spent many an hour laboriously working through each manuscript hand-checking the spelling and grammar — which required me to be conversant in both, and have on hand the means to double-check same. I still have the Associate Press Stylebook on my desk, along with the New York Times and the Chicago manuals of style, The Elements of Grammar, the Elements of Editing, and a whole host of other reference works, including the big fat Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, the more compact Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, and the Houghton Mifflin Canadian English Dictionary.
But today’s writers don’t want to be weighed down with the burden of hardcopy reference works. So what do they do? Hit a button and let a machine check it for you. Chances are, not only will the machine make a few mistakes along the line (“doe snot” certainly fits the bill!), but the user will also just as likely not learn anything.
And I think that’s the difference.
I believe this little glitch has now largely been fixed, but as late as one week before the last election if you typed “Obama” the all-knowing MicroSoft software would “helpfully” ask you if you in fact meant “Osama.”
I bet you’ll get a laugh out of this, but one reference I use a lot is Webster’s New World Speller/Divider. It’s a tiny red book, probably about 3″ x 4″, that contains nothing but a long list of words (no definitions, etc.). I find myself checking the kinds of words that Dick referred to, like occurred and necessary and exaggerate and weird and niece.
Spell Check has indeed saved me often, in both manuscripts and e-mails, but I try not to rely on it too much. And if something’s really important (or in the pubic interest, Dale), I’ve found myself doing what Sandra mentioned: printing it out and proofreading it on paper.
The problem with the “rules” of spelling is that there are always exceptions, as with “i before e.”
To this day the way I remember how to spell “success” is by closing my eyes, transporting myself back to high school mentally, and replaying the cheerleaders chanting “S-U-C-C-E-S-S, that’s the way we spell success . . . .”
Regarding most of the spelling errors I’ve seen in others’ manuscripts, I honestly do suspect that Spell Check was the culprit. They were words like broach instead of brooch, clinch instead of clench, loop instead of loupe. Correct spelling but incorrect usage.
Dale, the next time you sell a story to Ellery Queen, remember that high school cheerleaders contributed to your literary talents.
I recently acquired the Oxford Spellchecker and Dictionary, an add-on for Microsoft Word that replaces the built-in spellchecker. It has a feature that flags correctly spelled but possibly incorrect word choices it calls “confusables” (e.g., there, their, they’re; it’s, its; then, than; except, accept; etc.). I like it much better than the original spellchecker because it contains a lot more words and doesn’t tell me that a word I know I spelled correctly was spelled wrong simply because it has such a tiny, pea-brained vocabulary and doesn’t recognize it.
The one thing a spellchecker won’t do is teach you to spell and there are still typos that my new toy will blithely sail right on by: the Oxford Spellchecker doesn’t suggest “public” as an alternative for “pubic”, although I do remember a routine with Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner where the 2000-year-old man ralked about getting his “public” hair at about age 200.
I don’t blame bad spelling on the computer. I first noticed that nobody could spell in the late 70s, before the advent of word processors. I blame it on the demise of the use of drill as an educational technique.
RED ALERT! I just saw the list of Shamus nominations for Best Short Story, and one of them is “Panic on Portage Path” (AHMM) by Dick Stodghill.
Sincere congratulations, Dick! Well deserved.
I’m a bad speller and always have been. I was always the first to sit down during the spelling bees in school. Proof reading, well I’m bad at that too. When I’m composing on the computer, I always have my dictionary within arms length because I know I’m going to misspell some words. What I haven’t been able to figure out is how, if I can’t spell the word, I can find it in the dictionary.
Thanks for the information, John. I wasn’t aware of that.
I use that little Webster book, too.
I am a cruddy speller, so I use every means available to me. Especially the old giving-it-the-eyball with a dictionary and letting someone else do it too thing!
This didn’t stop a letter I sent off to a magazine from opening up with the words, and I quote myself here, “Dear Edito;”
Thanks!
Louis and Jeff — Good speller or bad, proofreading is always hard. I know folks who say they almost never have to proofread because they’re careful enough to correct themselves as they go, so when they’re done they’re done. That may be true for them, but not for me. I not only make dumb mistakes, I can’t seem to locate them afterward. That makes sense, actually: proofreading is difficult because since you know what you intended to say, you tend to overlook what you actually said.
And typing “Dear Edito” isn’t nearly as bad as spelling the editor’s name wrong, which I have done.
Maybe, but the “Dear Edito;” was sent with a request for submission guidelines to Marion Zimmer Bradley, a writer more picky about puntuation and spelling than JLW!!!! (It was for her magazine which folded soon after. Alas!)
And I just screwed-up the word “punctuation!”
JLW and MZB are smiling! (So am I!!)
I never go high and to the right over typos, Jeff, and not over honest mistakes, either — only over the self-congratulatory attitude that such things as spelling and punctuation aren’t important, championed by one of the ugliest phrases in the English language: “Well, you knew what I meant.”
Yeah, so I’m psychic. It is the responsibility of the writer to be accurate, not the responsibility of the reader to divine the intended meaning.
Hey, I’m just glad somebody’s paying attention! To spelling, punctuation or anything!!! (Good time to reccomend the great Mellvile Davisson Post story “An Act Of God.”)