Dr ken Smith suggests:
"University teachers should simply accept as variant spellings those words our students most commonly misspell."
He added. "All I am suggesting is that we might well put 20 or so of the most commonly misspelled words in the English language on the same footing as those other words that have a widely accepted variant spelling."
He said the word "judgement" was already accepted as a variant of "judgment", adding: " So why can't "truly" be accepted as a variant spelling of "truly"?
He blamed failings in the school system declaring:
"There was little evidence of students having been taught the relevant rules at school, or of the students having been corrected for obvious and frequent errors."
Jack Bovill, chairman of the Spelling Society, said its national survey had shown up to 54 % of people couldn't spell words such as "embarrassed", "separate", "accommodation", "millennium" and "friend".
He said the society did not advocate changing the spellings.
By Laura Clark
Education Correspondent
Daily Mail, Thursday, August 7, 2008
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