Just finished changing a dozen instances of posotive to positive. Such is life in the trenches.

I'm not the greatest of spellers. In fact, there are some words (e.g. pronunciation, complimentary, separate) that I consistently spell incorrectly.

Often my misspelling is a result of a pronunciation spelling, itself usually based on a nonstandard pronunciation (or should I say "pronounciation?"). This makes it hard to tell where the pronunciation spelling stops and the spelling pronunciation begins.

(A friend of mine, the zine guy, makes a habit of pointing out the standard pronunciation when I slip up. Unfortunately, he always frames his observations as the "correct" way to pronounce something — the IPA notation from Moses' tablets, I guess — which leads to an excessive amount of protestation on my part. I should probably try to learn enough about my Minnesotan accent to separate my local color from my ignorance.)

My solution to the spelling issue is straightforward and boring: I've long since fell into the habit of looking up a word if I'm at all unsure about its spelling. To Bartleby!

Of course, there is another way: I could throw myself into the fight for a free and democratic orthography. Unfortunately, I'm not that h.c.

Also, there's the whole "edits for a living" thing.

Labels: editing, pronunciation, spelling