The Art of Writing Speaking the English Language | Page 5

Of course no one of us can possibly have occasion to use all of those words; but at the same time, every one of us may sooner or later have occasion to use any one of them. As we cannot tell before hand what ones we shall need, we should be prepared to write any or all of them upon occasion. Of course we may refer to the dictionary; but this is not always, or indeed very often, possible. It would obviously be of immense advantage to us if we could find a key to the spelling of these numerous but infrequently used words.
The first duty of the instructor in spelling should be to provide such a key. We would suppose, off-hand, that the three hundred thousand school-teachers in the United States would do this immediately and without suggestion--certainly that the writers of school-books would. But many things have stood in the way. It is only within a few years, comparatively speaking, that our language has become at all fixed in its spelling. Noah Webster did a great deal to establish principles, and bring the spelling of as many words as possible to conform with these principles and with such analogies as seemed fairly well established. But other dictionary-makers have set up their ideas against his, and we have a conflict of authorities. If for any reason one finds himself spelling a word differently from the world about him, he begins to say, "Well, that is the spelling given in Worcester, or the Century, or the Standard, or the new Oxford." So the word "authority" looms big on the horizon; and we think so much about authority, and about different authorities, that we forget to look for principles, as Mr. Webster would have us do.
Another reason for neglecting rules and principles is that the lists of exceptions are often so formidable that we get discouraged and exclaim, "If nine tenths of the words I use every day are exceptions to the rules, what is the use of the rules anyway!" Well, the words which constitute that other tenth will aggregate in actual numbers far more than the common words which form the chief part of everyday speech, and as they are selected at random from a vastly larger number, the only possible way to master them is by acquiring principles, consciously or unconsciously, which will serve as a key to them. Some people have the faculty of unconsciously formulating principles from their everyday observations, but it is a slow process, and many never acquire it unless it is taught them.
The spelling problem is not to learn how to spell nine tenths of our words correctly. Nearly all of us can and do accomplish that. The good speller must spell nine hundred and ninety-nine one thousandths of his word correctly, which is quite another matter. Some of us go even one figure higher.
Our first task is clearly to commit the common irregular words to memory. How may we do that most easily? It is a huge task at best, but every pound of life energy which we can save in doing it is so much gained for higher efforts. We should strive to economize effort in this just as the manufacturer tries to economize in the cost of making his goods.
In this particular matter, it seems to the present writer that makers of modern spelling-books have committed a great blunder in mixing indiscriminately regular words with irregular, and common words with uncommon. Clearly we should memorize first the words we use most often, and then take up those which we use less frequently. But the superintendent of the Evanston schools has reported that out of one hundred first-reader words which he gave to his grammar classes as a spelling test, some were misspelled by all but sixteen per cent{.} of the pupils. And yet these same pupils were studying busily away on categories, concatenation, and amphibious. The spelling-book makers feel that they must put hard words into their spellers. Their books are little more than lists of words, and any one can make lists of common, easy words. A spelling-book filled with common easy words would not seem to be worth the price paid for it. Pupils and teachers must get their money's worth, even if they never learn to spell. Of course the teachers are expected to furnish drills themselves on the common, easy words; but unfortunately they take their cue from the spelling-book, each day merely assigning to the class the next page. They haven't time to select, and no one could consistently expect them to do otherwise than as they do do.
To meet this difficulty, the author of this book has prepared a version of the story of Robinson Crusoe which contains a large proportion of the common