Amercia: Land of the Free, Home of the Bad Spellers

Last week, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his campaign handlers found themselves in the middle of a quick spelling clean-up job after he tweeted the phrase "a better Amercia" to millions of followers.

In the whole scheme of things, really it was no biggie—we all make spelling mistakes. And this one appeared to be more of a finger slip, versus an inability to spell.

However, in this current age of spell-check, digi-talk and predicative texting, it does raise the question of whether we, as a nation, have adopted a totally new convention, whereby spelling—or rather correct spelling—matters less and less to most users of electronic devices.

And as a trend, it appears as though it may only get worse: For example, in thousands of public schools across hundreds of communities, spelling has all but disappeared, simply because it isn't tested annually on state reading exams.

"You can walk into many classrooms these days and there is no spelling program, there is no spelling book,” said Louisa Moats, author of several textbooks about language in a USA Today article. Even if there is a spelling program, she said, it's "an afterthought, and it's usually just a list of words that kids are told to go and learn—there's very little instruction in how it all works, how it makes sense."

Go ahead and admit it, you see it all the time: A text or email sent to you littered with spelling errors. But many of us will forgive the sender, as we occassionally find ourselves guilty of the same infractions and in some cases to a similar degree.

In the end, we blame bad—or rather poor—spelling on the need for speed.

But Moats disagrees: "If a paper or an application or a report or even an e-mail contains spelling errors, people who read it judge it harshly," she said. Research even shows that people with misspellings on job applications and résumés are less likely to get interviews.

So, in this new tech world of hyper-texting, how important is correct spelling to you? Take our poll and let us know your thoughts in the comments.