I'm a fairly intelligent, well-educated person with a facebook. I get SO ANNOYED when people are constantly picking out my typos and making it seem like I'm an idiot. Is there actually a correlation between intelligence and how prone one is to make careless mistakes will typing? There are external factors like . . . my D key sometimes sticks, etc. But it's facebook, not my doctoral thesis, so the editing standards are low. And separately, is there even a correlation being a legitimately poor speller and intelligence? Aside from typing to fast and having a shoddy keyboard, i DO in fact rely on spell check pretty often, and have struggled with spelling since i was a kids. My mom always told me that Bill Clinton, although he's very intelligent, was a notoriously poor speller. At least until he practiced really, really hard, so i should to. - Lily Leach
Usually I correct typos in the letters we publish, Lily. Yours I left alone. We need examples of orthographical errors, and you made a heap.
The short answer to your main question is that poor spelling may, but doesn't necessarily, indicate low intelligence. You could just be dyslexic-dyslexia being not merely the tendency to transpose letters, as many inaccurately believe, but rather a reading disability.
Dyslexia is unrelated to intelligence; those suffering from it often have a tough time spelling. How can you tell a dyslexic bad speller from an ordinary dope?
Some researchers categorize lexical disorders based on the type of spelling mistake made most often. One old study (Finucci et al, 1983) drew a distinction between phonetic and dysphonetic errors.
Phonetic mistakes are based on the sound of the target word-"strat dop" for "straight dope," for example. Dysphonetic mistakes are more exotic, such as adding or switching syllables, e.g., "effinemate" for "effeminate." A crude test is: phonetic errors make sense at a certain level, whereas dysphonetic errors are just weird.
Finucci attempted to correlate the two types of mistake with IQ, degree of dyslexia, etc. Their conclusion: phonetic errors are the most common, but dyslexics make more dysphonetic errors, indicating some kind of hiccup in lexical processing.
Those making many strictly phonetic errors, on the other hand, aren't dyslexic, they're just not too bright.
Researchers today generally don't use phonetic and dysphonetic to mean the same thing Finucci did in 1983. Also, not everybody buys the idea that dyslexic and naondyslexic spelling errors are easily distinguished. So let's consider this a hypothesis and the following an experiment, with you, Lily, as guinea pig.
First, we sort out your own mistakes:
• Typos. You start off capitalizing "I," then switch to lowercase. No big deal in itself. (You lowercase "Facebook," but so does their logo, so we'll ignore that.)
• Omissions. You're missing a "between" after your second "correlation."
• Phonetic errors. You write "will" for "while," and twice substitute "to" for "too."
• Dysphonetic errors. You write "since i was a kids."
Let's review: (1) You're self-conscious about your spelling. (2) You're articulate and spell well enough most of the time. (3) Your brief letter contains eight deviations from standard English usage. (4) If in light of (1) through (3) we discount the possibility you're a garden-variety bad speller, your mistakes take on a different character. There's some chance you've got a form of dyslexia.
Find that comforting? You shouldn't. This is a rough problem to have. We're told in the era of Facebook and Twitter nobody cares about grammar and spelling. Don't believe it. In the global conversation made possible by the Internet, the easiest way to tell the smart folk from the knuckleheads is how often they make seemingly ignorant mistakes. You can make a few and still be taken seriously. Make a lot and you won't.
Unfair? There's a simple solution even non-dyslexics would profit from. Read what you write before you click "send." cs
