Can't spell your way out of a wet paper bag?

At the start of my writing seminars, I always ask the attendees what they want to learn in our time together. What is one goal they have?

I get lots of great answers and, thankfully, it pertains to the material I have prepared in their coil-bound workbooks.

But almost every time, I have one attendee who offers something like this: "I am a terrible speller, and I think if I could be better at it I'd be a better writer."

I love this comment more than any other in my entire workshop. Because I know I am going to make that person's day with research-proven information that may shed their anxiety and set them free.

"Okay," I say. "Let's deal with this one right off the bat. Here's the honest truth: Great spellers are born and not made."

There is silence in the room.

"Good spellers are good visual memory learners. It has nothing to do with intelligence, but a certain kind of learning skill some of us are born with when we enter this world," I say, citing the experts who have studied it.

I go on to explain to them that you can get on the Internet and find software and all kinds of things you can buy that promise to increase your visual memory. But I don't recommend these things to help with spelling, because it's not necessary.

There are other things you can do to compensate.

First, know this. If you were not born with the gift of strong visual memory and spelling is a struggle for you, you learn very well in other ways. And you can be a great writer. John Updike, a great writer, was an admitted horrible speller. What Updike did to overcome it is this: Each time he looked up a word in the dictionary (he wrote his best works before we had spell checkers), he put a little ink mark next to it.

When he looked up the word three times (and he could keep track with his ink marks), he wrote the word down and spelled it over and over until he memorized it.

You could do the same thing. This is what all those who struggled with spelling did to get through elementary school. They memorized the words they use the most frequently.

You can also rely on your spell checker. Because I firmly believe spell check was invented by an incredibly intelligent computer geek who couldn't spell his way out of a wet paper bag in grade school. (I didn't say "his or her way out of a wet paper bag" because there is a really good chance it was a guy, the tech industry being dominated by men and all.)

Even elementary school educators, whom I have talked with extensively about this topic, agree that strong spelling skills are increasingly less important with the proliferation of computers and spell check. (I will tell you not to trust spell check in a future post on proofreading, however.)

Professors I work with balk at me when I share my comments on spelling and its connection to visual memory learning. "People are just lazy," they say, "and don't want to look words up." Or, "It's because people don't read anymore."

Research doesn't back these comments up. It does back up the visual memory skills, however.

So, you spelling-bee-champ-wanna-bees, take note. And take comfort. You may only be a mediocre natural speller, but you can be a great writer in spite of it.