does spelling matter?

Question 1

paragraph plans:

Answer 1

1. technology
2. companies
3. english writers
4. spelling research

Question 2

intro:

Answer 2

While some spelling mistakes are harmless and funny, many aren’t. The humble typo not only has the power to make us appear less intelligent than we are. Poor spelling can also create confusion, a loss of clarity and meaning and in extreme cases it can cost millions in missed sales and job opportunities. It has the potential to wreck customer relationships and even ruin your chance of finding love online.

But if no-one is immune and technology is tending to make bad spelling commonplace – take the rise of ‘text speak’ abbreviations for example – is perfect orthography no longer of value? And, is it OK to misspell words?

Question 3

technology paragraph:

Answer 3

New technologies, such as Apple’s Siri function, also contribute to the rising apathy toward correct spelling. “If you look at the development of technologies, whether it’s quill pens to fountain pens to ball point pens to keyboards, the goal is to go faster because you want to match the pace of the ideas in your head,” says Trubek. “Siri does that the best.”

An official White House press statement recently called for ‘peach’ in the Middle East
Autocorrection is probably why an official White House press statement recently called for ‘peach’ in the Middle East, rather than ‘peace’, says Simon Horobin, professor of English language and literature at the University of Oxford. “There are all sorts of problems that are going to come up if you think you’ve got a completely fail-safe method. You’ve still got to learn how to spell,” he says.

Question 4

mispelled companies paragraph:

Answer 4

Deliberately unconventional spelling can be a means of advertising one’s rebelliousness, marking one’s membership of a group, or making a name stand out – Krispy Kreme, Ludacris, Inglourious Basterds. It can have propitious consequences: Google and Ovaltine both owe their names to misspellings – of googol and Ovomaltine, respectively. And misspelling doesn’t necessarily prevent comprehension. Yu can undrestand tis. Und proberly allso vis.

A university study finds consumers respond less positively to new products when their brand names use unconventional spellings of real words, like “Klear” instead of “Clear.”
Researchers at Ohio State University and the University of Notre Dame found across a number of studies that participants thought unconventional spelling was a marketing tactic designed to make the brand seem “cool or trendy” and felt the brand seemed less sincere. Lyft, Tumblr, Flickr, Reddit and Netflix are some examples of 21st century brands with misspelled names although examples can be found farther back in retail history. Some classic brands with misspelled names include Kool-Aid, Dunkin’, Trix, Rice Krispies, Froot Loops, Lite Brite, Play-Doh and Slip ‘N Slide.

Question 5

famous writers paragraph:

Answer 5

Even Nobel Prize winners and celebrated authors have trouble getting words right.

1. Jane Austen
   Luckily, the author of Emma and Pride and Prejudice was always fortunate enough to find editors who could weed out her various alphabetical mishaps. An early work, written when Austen was 15, was called Love and Freindship.
2. Albert Einstein
   In Einstein’s defence, English was his second language. It’s therefore easy to understand why spelling and grammatical errors in his works were a constant source of frustration to the physicist. “I cannot write in English,” he said, “because of the treacherous spelling.”

Some of these are well-known figures: Samuel Johnson, whose many interventions included drawing a distinction between council and counsel, and George Bernard Shaw, who claimed that ‘Shakespeare might have written two or three more plays in the time it took him to spell his name with eleven letters instead of seven’.

Question 6

research stats paragraph:

Answer 6

According to a researcher at Cambridge University, it doesn’t matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter can be at the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without problem. This is because the human mind does not read every letter by itself but the word as a whole.

In 2011, researchers from the University of Glasgow, conducting unrelated research, found that when something is obscured from or unclear to the eye, human minds can predict what they think they’re going to see and fill in the blanks. “Effectively, our brains construct an incredibly complex jigsaw puzzle using any pieces it can get access to”

He conducted 16 experiments and found that yes, people could recognise words if the middle letters were jumbled, but, as Davis points out, there are several caveats. It’s much easier to do with short words, probably because there are fewer variables. Function words that provide grammatical structure, such as and, the and a, tend to stay the same because they’re so short. This helps the reader by preserving the structure, making prediction easier.