(Moderate) Spelling reform

Advice about keeping a blog always says not to apologise for not writing for a while, because no one will really notice, so just write whatever it is without mentioning it. But I'm not apologising; I'm noting the fact that this term was so bloody ridiculous that I didn't have one single bit of head space to knock out a blog post now and again, a task that I know from experience only takes me about half an hour while I'm watching telly (yes, sorry, I don't give you, my adoring public, my best time, or in fact much time... you deserve more, but I'm not paid for this). 

So hey, welcome back. It's been a few months. I have a few things I saved for later, so I'll go through them and see if any of them at all are still relevant. For now, let's talk about this spelling reform that got voted in by the English Spelling Society last week. It's actually surprisingly sensible, though of course totally unnecessary. It doesn't change much, and they suggest that the minimal changes are just sort of floated in as legitimate alternatives and that they'll hopefully catch on as standard. Seems fair enough. There's a screenshot of the Times article about it below, which I'm not linking to as it's paywalled but you can find if you want. 

It's just things like having double consonants mean something consistent, I think syllable stress, and removing Es that don't change pronunciation. So you get surender but edducate. I can't tell what the logic is behind changing fields to feelds but not beaches to beeches; they say that it's ok to have one sound be spelt in different ways but each spelling should make one sound, so maybe it's because <ie> is taken for the /ai/ ('eye') sound. 

It overlooks that there are some things that won't make any more sense to people who don't speak Standard Southern British English, of course, as they always do. So they say good will be guud, and foot will be fuut, and blue will be bloo. Totally fine for me, as good and foot do have the same vowel, while blue has a different one. But there are some speakers who have more or less the same vowel in all three of those words and others who have a different vowel in the first two. So I'm not sure it will achieve its aim of making spelling more logical for everyone. 

I wonder whether people who are planning to adopt it will need to write a little note to say so until it catches on. So if someone wants to submit their essay with this spelling, will they put a note at the top to say that's what they've done? 

This is reminiscent of the howling of the papers recently, including the Times I might add, about universities being advised not to deduct marks for bad spelling. When I mark essays I already don't take marks off for incorrect spelling or non-standard English. We haven't 'taken marks off' for anything for years, in fact, as we award marks for what is done well against a set of marking criteria, which include 'clarity of expression' and 'accuracy'. This is likely to include a lack of spelling errors, but doesn't absolutely require it as you can be clear and still spell things differently. The Times article itself says:

[Hull] university said that it would instead “encourage students to develop a more authentic academic voice, a voice that can communicate complex ideas with rigour and integrity — that celebrates, rather than obscures their particular background or characteristics”.

But they then quote Frank Furedi (lamentably from my own institution) saying that inclusive assessment 'violates the norms of academic education', so I'll have to check with them whether it would be OK to use these new spellings or not. I don't know why they went to Furedi, a retired sociology professor, rather than one of the many linguists or pedagogy experts, no, I can't imagine the reason. 

Anyway, spelling reform, sure, whatever, it's not really needed but go ahead, but encouraging students to find an authentic academic voice seems a good thing to me, and I secretly hope that one day someone will submit an essay written entirely in their own non-standard variety as a conscious act of linguistic politics.