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".
Dr Smith, a criminology lecturer at Buckinghamshir
e New University in High Wycombe, said: "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 has put forward ten words that are most commonly misspelt by his students. These include 'arguement' for 'argument' and 'twelth' for 'twelfth'.
He has even suggested adding the word 'misspelt' to the list and all those that break the 'i before e' rule – namely weird, seize, neighbour and foreign.
Jack Bovill, chairman of the Spelling Society, 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."
The full article contains 230 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
