Embrace bad spelling, says Prof. Ken Smith.

Commonly misspelt words should not be corrected but accepted into everyday usage, a university lecturer suggested today.

Years of correcting his students' atrocious spelling has left Professor Ken Smith so fed up that he is proposing the most common spelling mistakes should simply be accepted as "variant spellings".

In an article for the Times Higher Education Supplement, Dr Smith, a criminology lecturer at Buckinghamshire New University in High Wycombe, wrote: "Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I've got a better idea.

"University teachers should simply accept as variant spellings those words our students most commonly misspell.

"The spelling of the word 'judgement', for example, is now widely accepted as a variant of 'judgment', so why can't 'truely' be accepted as a variant spelling of 'truly'?"

As a starting point, Dr Smith puts forward 10 words that are most commonly misspelt by his students.

These include 'arguement' for 'argument' and 'twelth' for 'twelfth'.

He also suggests adding the word "misspelt" to the list and all those that break the 'i before e' rule - namely weird, seize, neighbour and foreign.

He adds: "Either we go on beating ourselves and our students up over this problem or we simply give everyone a break and accept these variant spellings as such.

"Remember, I am not asking you to learn to spell these words differently. All I am suggesting is that we might well put 20 or so of the most commonly misspelt words in the English language on the same footing as those other words that have a widely accepted variant spelling."

Jack Bovill, chairman of the Spelling Society, welcomed Dr Smith's suggestions but said they would not be advocating changes just yet.

He said: "It's a waste of time if people aren't aware of the problems caused by the irregularity of English spelling in the first place."

But Chrissie Maher founder of Plain English Campaign condemned Dr Smith's suggestions.

She said: "It sickens me to consider we would allow anyone the liberty to destroy our heritage just because they are fed up with seeing it misused.

"Instead do something about it, deal with the real problem, stop the rot! Put it right from the start."

**Dear God no. This is so symbolic of the shambles that is our state run, money pissed up against the wall, socialist dogma controlled education system.

The simple fact that Professor Ken Smith missed is that employers, soulless bastards that they are will look at applications and CV's and toss the badly spelled ones into the bin. After all if they can't have the words spelled correctly whilst applying for their dream job then why the hell should an employer waste their time with them pissing off customers with badly drafted letters.

He and other professors may bleat on about that being unfair, but sadly the real world is just that, cruel and unfair and demanding that people who work for them at least run their work through a spellchecker before - for example - contacting a client by letter or e-mail.

Sure mistakes happen, but for our education system to give up that is all the professor can advise and that is what he is saying here.

He says that he has a better idea and his idea is the same one that a Frenchman confronted by guns or terrorism has, the idea of offering the white flag; I however offer this:

1.Mark students down for each and every spelling mistake.
2. Keep on marking them down until they learn to a/spell correctly or b/ use a spellchecker.

Simple point is that the education system has and is continuing to fail if after some 13 years or so of education people are turning up in professor Ken's classes and making the mistakes that he spots.

He might care to think back to his days in school and the times when he might have been lambasted in front of the class or made to write correctly some word or phrase he had done incorrectly. Indeed a large red circle around an obvious mistake and a marking down of points is an incentive to those who wish to pass their exams.

If we returned to that in the education system of yesteryear, he might in a few years have less mistakes on the papers he is handed by the students in his classes.

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