Oh, and if you're a bad speller:

Have you ever tried to improve your spelling, or did you pretty much just say "f*ck you, spelling" from the get go and stopped bothering?

Yes. I've always been a great speller, though I think the gap between me and the "Average Joe" has shrunk since junior high school.

Yez.

There are one or two words that I can never quite get, but besides those I've always found spelling easy. If I dug out an old diary or workbook from when I was a child, I'd struggle to find a mispelled word.
I can't remember having to put any effort into learning how to spell, but there's lots of stuff I can't remember learning

There are a few words that I regularly struggle with. But for the most part, I'm naturally a fairly good speller. It's definitely not something I get marked down for in English class.

i'm so-so
i can spell most stuff correctly but certain words here and there bamboozle me

i can always tell if something isn't right though, it's just sometimes it's a case of spellcheck to figure out where i went wrong

Horrible speller. I've tried, but just can't seem to improve. Partly because I have a horrible memory, partly because I'm slightly dyslexic, so I never really see the proper spelling. (I have to stop and completely sound out county vs country, because both usually work in the context and I can't see the difference.)

Spellcheck is a lovely thing.

in my experience spelling abilities are strongly correlated to elementary education and exposure to reading from a young age. I know a lot of very smart people who grew up in poor neighborhoods and while all of their writing is sound at this point, the spelling is still difficult to pick up

I've always been a really good speller in my native language. In English there are a few words now and again where I have to ask my bf about,, but they are few and far apart.

(sorry for lack of commas. The comma key on our laptop is fairly broken)

where I have to ask my bf?? THAT I have to ask him.... ffs.

i'm a pretty great speller

in second grade my class had a spelling bee and i missed a couple words and was deeply ashamed and people laughed at me

but in fourth grade we had one and i f*cking DOMINATED
the word "thoroughbred" was given to the girl right after me and she couldn't spell it so it went around the entire circle and everyone missed it BUT THEN IT GOT BACK TO ME
i was the last one standing but i had to spell the word to truly be the winner
and i spelled the SH*T out of "thoruoghbred"!
oh my god i just typo'd that in a story about how great i can spell it
but y'know what i'm just gonna leave it because that's amazing

i'm a precipitously fraudulent propagator of elocution who is subservient to the succor of automated grammatical correction.

*orthographical

Spelling comes naturally to me. I used to win spelling bees all the time. Even if I don't know a word's meaning, I can usually spell it.

Uv coors I em. I aysed speling in skool!

Obviously, I'm kidding with that. I'm a big stickler with my spelling. If I catch my typos, I go and correct them. And I have trouble with some things. In fact, one of the trivia questions in the paper today was what the two spellings of the plural of octopus was. I got octopuses wrong.

I can be a bit of a grammar nazi sometimes.

I see words in my head as I say or hear them, so it's easy for me. There are a few words, though, that I never learned how to spell, so I don't really know them.

On Thursday 8/1/13 - 6:42:40 PM Kungfullama wrote: in my experience spelling abilities are strongly correlated to elementary education and exposure to reading from a young age. I know a lot of very smart people who grew up in poor neighborhoods and while all of their writing is sound at this point, the spelling is still difficult to pick up

I think there's truth to this. I have noticed that some of my friends with low-income backgrounds struggle with spelling more than my friends with middle-class backgrounds.

That being said, there is a fair share of poor spellers in the second group, so perhaps natural tendencies play a role too.

both, there are a few words i can never spell right, i dont know why

I try to be. I try to use "bigger" words when I can so that I can improve myself as well. Though there are some I still need spell-check to write out properly.

I've never been good at spelling, reading perfectly fine,

Reading words which were hard from a young age, I was in advanced classes for reading but spelling was something I have just always struggled with, which made it hard for teachers to slot me into the right classes.

Antidisestablishmentarianism

Nailed it!!

Copy and paste really helps when you try to spell things right

On Tuesday 8/6/13 - 10:20:54 PM TaylorGang wrote: Antidisestablishmentarianism Nailed it!!

that's a long word but not terribly difficult to spell since it's like 100% phonetic