After several years of good and loyal service in the cause of rescuing spelling from the stifling shackles of the schooling schemes and systems, the original Real Spelling Tool Box is moving progressively into well-deserved retirement. Step by step each of the seven Tool Kits is being completely revised, rewritten and re-presented as a multimedia resource on disk - materially more compact and conceptually more extensive,

Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson pleaded guilty on August 11 for defacing a more than 60-year-old, hand-painted sign at Grand Canyon National Park on March 28. What was their crime? They used a marker to cover an erroneous apostrophe, put the apostrophe in its proper place with white-out and added a comma. They toured the United States this spring, wiping out errors on government and private signs.

'Fake Phonology' is the title of an article that I am working on at the moment.  Just because a system or method claims to be 'phonological' is no guarantee in itself that it is actually so. Ersatz phonologies abound in the schooling literature world, and none is so fallacious as the error-ridden ‘phonemic awareness’ industry whose output infests so many schools.

Mnemonics in spelling are not only memory overload; they also imply that there is a lack of objective logic in spelling. Sending such a message to learners is utterly immoral in the pedagogical context. The mnemonic acrostics of the spelling methods and schemes simply reveal the orthographic bankruptcy of the systems, schemes and methods that push them.