When I was a kid.. I was outside playing. Seriously.
And then when I got older and could read, I was often reading books. And I think the knowledge and information you can glean from just reading books is enormous. Language isn't about spelling stuff right [1]. It's about having a comfortably large set of words at your disposal and knowing what words can go together to express feelings, atmosphere or intent.
[1]: the fascination with spelling seems to know no end in the USA. Spelling competitions?!
"When I was a kid.. I was outside playing. Seriously."
I think the author of this piece is really trying to help his struggling child succeed. To that point, right out of the gate, we learn that his child was, "[...] significantly behind his class in handwriting, letter reversals and spelling." In addition, we learn that his child was also receiving additional help from his teacher, in order to help bring him up to his learning level and potential. Finally, the author later notes that, "[...] I'm taking an hour per day with this."
That said, while I understand the overall sentiment of your comment, it comes across as condescending in this specific case. We're not talking about a parent that is grinding his child through hours and hours of flashcards, with no opportunity to play outside; we're talking about a parent that is trying to help his child succeed and be at the same level of his peers, by taking 1 hour a day to work through a learning routine.
Exactly. Thank you for responding effectively to a post that I wanted to respond do, but didn't know where to start. How do you explain to a non-parent what life is like for a parent? Or to explain to a parent whose kid has not had challenges what life is like with those challenges?
Before starting flashcards, parent-teacher conferences were endless variations on, "I know your son is brilliant, but we have a real problem here." Before starting flashcards, my son would look at his homework and have meltdowns because he didn't know any of it. (I'd prefer a system in which a grade 1 kid didn't have homework, but that's an issue for another discussion.)
I started the routine to fix that problem. Of course once I am doing this routine anyways, I want it to be effective and pleasurable. And since it is a fairly large piece of my life, I have put a lot of thought into how to do it well. But this effort is "get my kid on track for his abilities", and not "make my kid a star".
It is sad that you have to spend an hour a day improving upon your sons inconsequential weakness instead of being able to foster his strenghts. If he is indeed brilliant he will one day pick up spelling through osmosis, or maybe not. It took me until 16. The guy who thaught me how to program never got the hang of it.
The reason you do it is because you rightfully fear that the system will punish him for it. Probably not because you think it is the greatest thing your son can aspire to.
The reason you do it is because you rightfully fear that the system will punish him for it.
I was not motivated by an abstract fear of consequences that he might face some day. I was motivated by the consequences that I saw him actually experiencing.
That said, while I do not personally value spelling, I do think it is valuable for him to understand the power of regular review for establishing mastery of material.
the fascination with spelling seems to know no end in the USA
It's not unique to the USA - the French could tell you a thing or two about the Championnats d'Orthographe....
I agree with your point though. There is a telling moment in the OP, where it says that the son's reward for working the flashcards is the parent reading him books beyond his reading level. What is the point of spelling words ahead of your reading level? Spelling prowess comes from repeated exposure to written words[1]. It's called "reading" and I can't see any reason (aside from stupid standardised testing) that a kid's spelling ability needs to be ahead of their reading level.
[1] This is if why you are a perl programmer the word "pearl" starts looking wrong.
Edit, due to comments below:
The question is why are teachers asking for words to be spelled essentially out of context. I just can't think of a good reason because the only way you can learn them is by flashcard games, and like the comment above, I just can't see how it is a good use of a kid's time. I certainly do not blame the parent for making sure their kid does well at school, I just don't see the sense of school being this way.
Take the word, oh I don't know. Serialization. Or hypervisor. Or encryption. Most people here can spell them (I assume!) even though you were never required to learn to do so at school - you have learned by sheer exposure. You also know that the opposite of encryption is not unencryption, but decryption, and a decrypted message is not the same as an unencrypted message. Now of course there are linguistic reasons for all this, but the point is that you know these things because you encountered these words in context.
A kid that reads a Star-Trek tie-in is sure to be able to spell "teleportation". Yes, you can also teach a kid to spell that out of context with a flash card. But why? I just don't get it.
[Disclosure: frustrated non-native English speaker who had to teach a first grader to spell "reduce, reuse, recycle" this week, gaaaaah].
You have no idea how many times I've apologized to my son for the fact that English spelling makes no sense and he has to learn it. If I could wave a magic wand, we'd have a good phonetic spelling system. (And there is an example of a word that is not phonetically spelled...)
With that said, let me clarify a couple of potential misconceptions.
The words that I am teaching my son are not beyond his reading level. In fact they are taken from lists of words that he is expected to be able to read, and was asked to spell on tests in his classroom. His spelling winds up beyond his grade level simply because most kids his age don't know most of those words.
The only connection between the reward activity (reading) and the flashcards is that I use the first to make the second pleasurable. I'm not reading to him because it is good for him, I'm reading to him because he enjoys it. I'd be happy playing with marbles instead. I don't put words from the story into the flashcards - he has enough other stuff that he actually needs to learn which is higher priority.
He isn't learning to spell ahead of his reading level, he's learning to spell based on what his teacher suggests.
The reward is that he gets read to, read something he isn't yet able to read on his own because it's ahead of his reading level. The reward is enjoying some good fiction, nothing to do with learning how to spell words from this more-advanced text.
From "The Hoosier Schoolmaster", published in 1871, but I suppose representing the 1840s or 1850s:
" There is one branch diligently taught in a backwoods school. The public mind seems impressed with the difficulties of English orthography, and there is a solemn
conviction that the chief end of man is to learn to spell. "'Know Webster's Elementary' came down from Heaven," would be the backwoods version of the 'Greek saying but that, unfortunately for the Greeks, their fame has not reached so far. It often happens that the pupil does not know the meaning of a single word in the lesson. This is of no consequence. What do you want to know the meaning of a word for? Words were made to be spelled, and men were probably created that they might spell them. Hence the necessity for sending a pupil through the spelling-book five times before you allow him to begin to read, or indeed to do anything else. Hence the necessity for those long spelling-classes at the close of each forenoon and afternoon session of the school, to stand at the head of which is the cherished ambition of every scholar. Hence, too, the necessity for devoting the whole of the afternoon session of each Friday to a "spelling-match." In fact, spelling is the "national game" in Hoopole County. Baseball and croquet matches are as unknown as Olympian chariot-races. Spelling and shucking[10] are the only public competitions."
While I share your sentiment, I've always struggled with proper spelling even though I'd be considered by many (maybe not by HN standards, but certainly by average joe standards) to have above average written communication.
Spelling is important for a few reasons:
1. It creates a good first impression, if that impression is delivered in written form. (How many times have you degraded your opinion of someone because of a misused "your"?)
2. It broadens your ability to communicate because you can now focus on the message rather than remembering how to spell a word, or limiting yourself to words you can spell.
3. Perhaps most importantly, the rote memorization of unruly spellings is a great precursor to the rote memorization that is required to be competent in math. You can phonetically/use rules to determine how to spell "computer", but you need to memorize "receive", "sufficient" and "seize".
Again, not suggesting that this requires spelling competitions per se, but that spelling should not be discounted.
I'm not sure that getting 100% or perfect at anything is healthy. You have to learn that there is a chance factor to a success and you are not to blame about imperfect score if you really tried.
I had very hard time spelling words when I was at the beginning of the primary school. That didn't improve much but yay, we have spellcheckers now. And I have a Mensa membership and MA in computer science.
Also, algebra by flash cards? Is algebra something to remember and forget? I think you should learn it more like you learn to ride a bike not like the spelling. Physics obeys math. By getting math you are getting intuition about how world works and by remembering how to spell words you are getting a way of making yourself more understandable ... sometimes ... in writing ... without spellchecker.
Oh. And you might do well in a spelling competition (which is useless).
We have spelling competitions in my country too. They have written form. Most famous one had over 50 thousands participants over the course of 15 years. All competitors of given year write at the same time half a page of dictated text. Only 5 people in history of this competition didn't make any mistake in their text. Perfect should never be your target. Because even if task seems simple the difference between perfect and almost perfect is most likely luck.
You shouldn't overdo helping your kids. I know two parents who overdid this and their kids were doing extremely well but only up to the point when those parents stopped coaching them. One lasted till the end of primary school, other lasted till the end of the college.
Apart from all I said kudos for successfully helping your kid.
For a lot of kids, spelling competitions are fun, just like math competitions, sports competitions, and competition in general. And while spelling isn't the most important skill in the world, it's still useful. It's not like we spent all day in school on spelling, and outside of some fringe cases people don't spend much time studying it outside of school either.
I use Anki[1] with my kids (grades 1 and 3) for spelling, reading, and math. It works really well, was relatively easy to set up (import csv files), and keeps track of the spacing for me so I never have to worry about unconsciously filtering the hardest cards to the bottom.
Even better, Anki v2.0 just came out with the ability to have multiple profiles. (No more including the child's name in the deck's name... yay)
The downsides are:
The documentation is lacking in all but the most basic uses; The help forums are difficult to find [2];
You are tied to your computer (or smartphone).
I used Anki _extensively_ when I was in dental school--I think I had something like 10000 cards at the end of school. You can seriously pack knowledge into your head with spaced repetition.
Anyhow, Anki is AMAZING. The best thing it does is eliminate your downtime when you're studying. If you critically look at your periods where you sit down and do work, there's a fair amount of "staring out the window" time when you are not in [flow][0]. However, because of the timer system, I felt compelled to continue through flashcards throughout my 15 or 20 minute study periods. It feels great not to waste time. I should go donate to that project.
That is addressed in paragraph 2. At the start I needed to address problems with handwriting, which meant that the evaluation of whether he has done the flashcard correctly has to be done by me. Having flashcards on a computer, and then a manual evaluation, seemed like counterproductive complexity. I did not want a computer between me and my son for this activity.
But it turns out to be a good thing. Because the fact that I have been involved has let me track down issues, such as the need for a reward activity. Anki currently does not offer that as a feature.
However in a year or so I do want to move my son to something like Anki.
FWIW: I used Anki for learning a foreign language, with the help of a human, who would ask one side, and then rate my answer. This worked pretty well, in fact, and allowed the devolvement to Anki of spacing and scheduling, with the benefits you've mentioned.
English word construction seems like anarchy, but there really are rules—they’re just rules for all the different languages that english draws from, respective to each word. I learned to recognize the origin of words (from Greek, Latin, German, French, etc.) pretty early on, and it drastically cleared up the seeming chaos of how a word was spelled. Is your son getting any context behind the words? Otherwise I could see these exercises being as frustrating as trying to learn a modern symphony by ear with no knowledge of music.
The startup I'm working on is a flashcard mobile webapp that uses spaced repetition, but also uses multiple choice quizzes for new cards that get harder each time a card is shown again. This lets students transition from answer recognition to answer recollection without that anxious feeling that comes from trying to recall recently learned cards.
It was designed for adults learning vocabulary for second languages or professional certifications, but lately we've been trying to see what kinds of features we could add to make it more useful for kids as well. The recognize-to-recall transition could really be useful for students who otherwise would be overwhelmed from the anxious feelings of recalling recently new cards.
One feature we're looking at is the use of mini games and tiny (10-15 second) video clips to make the app more fun and help space out new cards a bit more.
If anyone has a child who could benefit from reduced-anxiety learning, I'd love to chat with you and get your thoughts. Check out my HN profile for my contact info and more about the webapp.
I have developed a flashcards app for both iOS ( http://christian-kienle.de/Flashcards-Pro/ ) and OS X ( http://christian-kienle.de/Flashcards ). For the development of these apps I tried several different learning systems and interviewed friends who are learning with flashcards how they do it. I found out that everyone learns a little bit differently so it was hard to find one system that everyone could work with. So I decided to make the system pretty flexible by introducing smart decks - something like smart playlists but for decks of cards. The drill mode described in the blog post cannot be emulated in a nice way by my apps. I may adopt it because it seems really good to get the information in your short term memory which is the first step. Thanks for sharing your experience.
Show the card. If it is right it goes to the done pile, if it is wrong, it goes to the back of the current pile. Repeat until there is nothing left in the current pile.
Then do the same thing the next day. We did this until I could get through the entire pile in one try.
This method seems overly complicated for both child and parent.
I did something similar to that as a kid. I hated it. It worked, but much less efficiently.
The strategy that you describe causes you to spend most of your time looking at cards that you've already mastered. You don't have the ability to slowly add to the list. You don't have the ability to have as many flashcards. And, according to the research, long-term retention is worse.
He currently has 465 cards that he's shown some retention on. Of those, tonight he will do 14. Your system would have him spending 33x as much effort maintaining that knowledge as what we're currently doing. A factor of 33 is worth some bookkeeping on my part.
> Your system would have him spending 33x as much effort maintaining that knowledge as what we're currently doing. A factor of 33 is worth some bookkeeping on my part.
I will grant you that. We only used this strategy for the times tables up to 12x12, which has a finite set of cards (144 if I remember my facts correctly :) ).
If I wanted to do an ever growing set, I might consider this method.
> And, according to the research, long-term retention is worse.
Can you point me at some good research on this area? I believe you, I'd just like to read more, as someone who is interested in this sort of thing.
I did the same, it is a very useful tactic. There are some programs that use this technique, usually mixing some "good" questions inside your current "todo" pile as well.
It seems in english speaking country there is a need for flashcard system too.
I want to share my view on "flashcard" app.
I am a chinese coder, who love learning and reading english.
To help people learn english words in long term(for school Exam,SAT,GRE, or just for work), I have made two web app.
1. jianbing.org （running for 2years, shutting down for bad UX, 20K users）
2. http://rollingword.com ( alpha, Launching, without rollingAlgorithm shipped)
To make things simple, I have a simple philosophy ： Our brain is a distribute network system just like DNS!
so our memo brain have two parts
1. Area like Local DNS (8.8.8.8) , which is fast(fast CPU) but memo unit have TTL (time to live). It just a cahce with small latency.
2. Area like Authority DNS( Like Router53) , slow CPU, Big database hard drive.It like computing strategy, coding, Learning.
We can not remember a word because it is not in the Local DNS(maybe in the Authority DNS area but it is a so slow CPU), or it is expired.
So our algorithm(calling rollingAlgorithm,which make word/cards rolling ) is to copy a Local DNS ttl table by collecting user test feedback;
how to test?
first user can get a list of cards/words， , by rollingAlgorithm(based on Actuarial Science, which used to calculate people life time).
the learning and reviewing is in a row. we show user a "pile" of card ,if user hit his cache , user click "Learn",we say he remember the word , send back a high score to rollingAlgorithm;
if cache missed,user click "fail", he will relearn the word and the word is queued in the row and will come up again (if missed again,come up again),send back a low score to rollingAlgorithm;
we collect user memo performance while they are learning!
What language(s) did you learn, how long have you been learning (them) and what level of fluency have you reached?
I have been using the Pimsleur Spanish CDs for almost 6 months. I have made a lot of progress (especially with vocabulary) but am still at a beginner level (high beginner though, almost low intermediate).
I finished German 1 a few years ago. I have 2/3 but haven't had time to work on them. #1 taught me so much so quickly that it was enough to get me through a couple of trips.
I learned basic Mandarin Chinese by using those CD's (Pimsleur) on the way to work and back for a whole year.
I am still amazed of how "organic" was the learning.. I mean, after some time I just started "understanding" more advanced conversations to the point that even my chinese friends got startled.
Also, I have not used the CD's for over 3 years (or spend time in china) and I still recall most of what I learned.
I think that's what stunned me the most about this type of learning is how deep the knowledge gets burned into your brain. It's not like cramming for an exam or reading the language dictionary on the flight over.
The basic idea is to keep the knowledge "in" the different memory spaces (short,medium,permanent) for it to get moved up to the next memory space, until it becomes "permanent".
Flashcards didn't work for my daughter at all. She just can't learn that way.
What we did for spelling and math facts was just to have her write each word/fact in the list X number of times (usually 5) and then we would quiz her on them. If she got them right, she was done. If she missed any, she would do them another X times. The rest of the week, we would quiz her each day before she started and she would only have to write the ones she got wrong. Usually she had everything down by Tuesday or Wednesday and her motivation was the progressively smaller amount of time she had to spend studying instead of playing.
Did you something like what is described in the post, or did you just do "the usual" with flashcards? (I have to admit I'm not confident you read the linked post before commenting based on the word "flashcard".)
This made me think back to Wordsmith (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordsmith_%28TV_series%29). It was the show that got me from a young age thinking about how you break up and form words, etc. To this day in my head from time to time I'll often play over words, breaking them up and similar (as though getting a 'taste' for the word).
I wonder if perhaps this show might be of benefit as well to the son of the submitter.
Ben, I didn't realize you had a child of just that age. Please allow me to recommend to you and to other HN participants who surf by who are parents of children learning to read the best--bar none--approach to initial reading instruction in English for native speakers of English. It has worked for all four of my children, including the three who spent significant parts of their childhood in a mostly Chinese-speaking environment (reducing their exposure to English speech and English printed materials). The book Let's Read, a Linguistic Approach
by Leonard Bloomfield (an eminent linguist and pioneer of new methods of teaching hard-to-learn languages) and Clarence L. Barnhart (a lexicographer) has now been revised by Cynthia A. Barnhart and Robert K. Barnhart (I presume they are the original co-author's children). I used the first edition, and can recommend it UNRESERVEDLY. The first edition appears to no longer be in print, and some Amazon reviewers say they prefer the first edition, but the second edition, currently available, surely is better than the great mass of school materials used for English reading instruction. How I used the book is to set a goal of somewhere between one lesson a day and six or seven pages a day, and then read each lesson out loud to my child, with my child then reading the lesson back to me, with adaptation earlier in the book to do the reading and reading back a sentence at a time, and near the end of the book for the child to read by himself or herself without me reading first. All my children are strong readers who love to read. You'll find that this book, under Bloomfield's pedagogical influence, makes good use of spaced repetition of the key sound-symbol correspondences in Engish. But this is reading connected text, rather than just looking at flash cards, and the stories are remarkably interesting for their carefully graded vocabulary.
More details if you like. My main online involvement in the early 1990s was discussion of optimal reading instruction approaches for United States schools, but now I've discovered that mathematics education needs at least as much help, and have shifted focus to that. But I could provide (old) links to rationale for this approach if you like, and anyway an ounce of inexpensive prevention is worth a pound of expensive cure when helping a child's initial reading instruction prevents future reading and spelling difficulties. And kudos to you for continuing to read aloud to your child as he learns to read. Not reading to children beyond school age is one of the big missed opportunities in many middle-class families.
Aside to other participants: I'm wondering how many people who have used flash cards for foreign language learning have put their languages to the test in a country where those languages are spoken. I have studied many languages (I think there is a partial list in my user profile), and what I have observed over and over is how each language maps reality in a different way, so that ones rarely correspond one-to-one in the manner expected by flashcards. I much preferred learning to read Chinese, for example, by using the excellent Chinese Reader series by John DeFrancis
I must add my experience with this wonderful book. My daughter is 5.3 years old. She started with this book when she was 4.6 years old. Before that she only knew the names of the letters. She is now at lesson 95 (out of more than 250) and she can read very well (she is reading books like Frog and Toad etc.) I intend to finish the whole book before her sixth birthday by which time I am sure she will be an excellent reader.
The way we work with the book is that I will read the first 2 or 3 words on the page and then she tries to read the rest. I help when help is needed. In a good day she can read about 95% of the text without any help. The reason for this is because the text is organized in an excellent way. There is only one new rule introduced in a lesson and the child can figure it out the from the first few words and can take it from there. In fact I have found that quite often when my daughter cannot read a word, it is because she has lost focus and forgot how she read the words that came before. We go back a few words and reread them and suddenly the new word that she could not read, now is easy.
One characteristic of this book that I haven't seen other people mention is that the book is great for non-native speaker teachers like myself. Before I started with this book I got another book that used the phonetics method. But I couldn't start teaching my daughter with that book because I couldn't make the phonetic sounds correctly myself. With Bloomfield's book there is no worry for me because I do not need to make any sounds, just read a few words when my daughter cannot read them.
Do you have a similar recommendation for German for native english speaking adults? Beyond terrible high school education in spanish, this would be my primary L2.
I used to have the same problem...
I was young, about 5th grade and all my essay where horrible full of grammar error and I always got very bad grades on those.
Then I move in the Junior High / Middle school and I was still doing very bad error, but the content of my essays was great so I was able to get about 60-70% on my test even if, again, the content was above the average.
It was bad especially in Italian (my first language), where how you say a word is exactly the same way in which you spell it, we don't even have idea of what a spelling competition is, it just doesn't make sense.
Then I move to high school, in my first essay I didn't do any single grammar error, it was great, no error at all.
I probably do have some problem especially with pronunciation, my parents used to bring me to some kind of doctor who I remember I hated, in my mind words were (and are) fine, but they just come out wrong out of my mouth, I ramble a lot.
Some people say that my mind just work faster than my mouth so I can't keep up with words and some of them come out wrong, obviously I can simply talk right if I put a little of effort on it, but sometimes especially when I am talking just because and other person are not suppose to care of what I am saying I just ramble (yes, I talk with myself, ok ???)
People usually don't define me like a dumb person, and my ramble nowadays is a problem only when I want it to be a problem...
I know that it is very hard to say, especially at a father, but kids most of the time just need time, your son is not stupid I won't stress him with those card, if you really want him to make some exercise ask him to keep a diary it helps a LOT, and not only with spelling but also with construction of phrase and syntax that is what really shape the mind of a person.
(NB Keep a diary is WAY HARDER than play with some cards, not because the spelling or the syntax, but because is something hard to do, it takes more effort, more time and he must be very determined doing that (I am not able to as instance) but it will lead to better result, it will give your son a wonderful memories especially for when he would be a teen or an adult, and it will teach your son DETERMINATION that is the only thing can be teached in order to make a successful person)
Not very relevant, but gee, wouldn't it be nice if spoken and written words were isomorphic? Think of all the frustration we could spare children if every time they heard a word, they could figure out exactly how to spell it. Once they master the individual letters, spelling becomes all but trivial.
Albanian, my mother tongue, is such a language. In first grade it took me all of 4 months to learn how to read and write everything. But that didn't mean I was reading everything. In fact I read my first book when I was in second grade and was reading independently only in fourth grade. One needs to practice reading to be able to read.
Spelling also is not trivial. There is a one to one correspondence between sounds and letters, yes, but before you can write the word you need to figure out all the sounds that make up that word and that is not trivial at all. Again from my experience, we were taking dictations until second year of high schools and we were still making mistakes.
I think that grammar actually plays a more important role in writing ability, at least when comparing Albanian and English. A verb in Albanian can appear in more than 70 different forms depending on the tense and other grammatical categories that I can't even translate, while a verb in English can appear in a very limited number of forms. I think it is much easier in English to remember by heart how to write those few forms than in Albanian to figure out how to write each form by sounding it. Of course an Albanian can predict how a verb should be written from the context (there are rules) but that cannot be done before having studied Albanian grammar for a few years.
It seems to me that at grade two, by the time you had as much experience as you describe in this post you ought to be blowing the doors off what is actually expected for a grade 2 student in school already, so I was surprised when the teacher suggested other things to be doing. Is he getting ahead now, or just catching up?
On the material that I've been covering, he is blowing the doors off of what is expected.
But that only applies to what I've been covering. For instance the word "because" has not appeared on his spelling tests since I began, so is not in the flashcard set. It turns out that he consistently misspells it and so there is some unlearning to do there.
The only two mnemonics that I've taught him are, There are two too many ways to spell 'tu' and I before e except after c, or when says "a" as in neighbor and weigh. I know that lots of people use mnemonics, but I've personally tended to find them more trouble than they are worth.
Until this week we hadn't encountered any facts that were sufficiently hard that he had to break them down to successfully master them. It is clear that he uses tricks acquired from one card to do another card. But I've not had to tell him how to do that.
I should note that drills usually involve under 10 cards. We're not talking about endless work. (In fact most of the work is reading to him. Which stretches his vocabulary, and is also a learning exercise, but I won't tell him that if you don't tell him that.)
The form of the rule that I was told in school is: I before E, except after C, when the sound is "ee". This (1) is pretty simple, (2) has rather few exceptions, and (3) does correctly give the spelling of lots of words that some people would otherwise find tricky.
Note that "except after C" means "ignore the rule in this case" rather than "reverse the rule in this case". That is, it doesn't mean "E before I, after C".
Of the 9 words on your list: 5 (science, frequencies, vacancies, fallacies, society) are "after C" and therefore not covered by the rule; 2 (eider, feisty) are never pronounced with an "ee" sound and therefore not covered by the rule; 1 (either) is sometimes pronounced that way and sometimes not and therefore a kinda-half-exception; 1 (seize) is a definite genuine exception.
There are a few other exceptions, but the rule in this form correctly fixes the spelling of a whole lot of common words (a few examples: piece, frieze, grief, believe, retrieve) that would be easy to get wrong without it.
And then when I got older and could read, I was often reading books. And I think the knowledge and information you can glean from just reading books is enormous. Language isn't about spelling stuff right [1]. It's about having a comfortably large set of words at your disposal and knowing what words can go together to express feelings, atmosphere or intent.
[1]: the fascination with spelling seems to know no end in the USA. Spelling competitions?!