Re: Terrible, Awful, No-good, Very Bad...spelling?
Interesting topic! I can't really add to what's been said, other than to add my own personal experiences.
I've always been picky about my spelling to a point, but I've never been pedantic about it. I used braille heavily from Kindergarten through 12th grade, but after that, I don't use it as much. I found that the words I read frequently during those 12 years of school are words which I can spell much more confidently. Any words I haven't read as much are harder for me to spell. Like perseverance. I have to look that up almost every time. But I know that if I had seen this word in braille enough, I would know how to spell it. It's really easy for me to create mental pictures of what a braille word or acronym looks like, so I will sometimes try to imagine a word in braille, once I know how to spell it. Trying to create such pictures is not at all the same as reading the braille written out, though. So I am in general agreement with everyone here who says that braille literacy tends to improve spelling if you're blind.
I am about as far from text speak as you can get, and this is something I've been meaning to post about at some point, so I might as well talk about it here. I never got into writing sentence fragments in messages. I use a few abreviations like lol, but I don't know many, and I also will sometimes omit words, like instead of saying "Do you know her?" I'll just say "You know her?" I don't know why I allow myself to do that, but I do. While I do understand why people go much further with text speak, I never found myself wanting to. I am so bad at relaxing my formality that I capitalize the first letters of sentences, and put periods at the end of things, as though I'm attempting to look professional. Even if it's just to say something like "Hold on." I'll literally write hold with a capital h, and put a period after on. Whether I'm typing on a computer, or on my phone. It makes no difference. It's just a habit I have; If I don't do it that way, I literally feel uncomfortable writing messages.
This makes me feel a bit awkward when talking to people because I do check their punctuation and spelling and other things, just out of curiosity. I notice that the majority of people do not at all write like me when messaging. I wonder if they notice my formal message-writing style. With blind people it's not as big a deal for me, because unless you use a braille display you'll likely miss that. But with sighted people, they're constantly reading the text, so they'll see it right away. Despite the dozens of sighted people I talk to, nobody ever mentions it. I often wonder if they notice it, but I'm having a bit of a hard time figuring out how they wouldn't. I only know two other people who I would even remotely suspect to share this formal messaging disposition with me, and I don't know how consistent they are.
And while I'm on the topic of writing. I have decent spelling, and can make decent sentences I think, but I am not really writing in a polished way I don't think. I'm just writing what I hear in my head, and putting commas and periods where I hear pauses. I've only started using semicolon, and I still second guess every time I want to use it. I never really latched onto the rules of grammar and sometimes it's really hard for me to decide where to put paragraph breaks. If I were a writer, I'd be freeking out probably, and I still kinda freek out a bit since I've always felt a little nervous when writing papers and essays and the like, but I got through them okay. But in college, in one of my music classes, I did write what was ultimately called a good paper, but it was criticized for its mechanics or something. I think the wording was that it could be mechanically improved. I got a decent grade on it but ever since then, my bad confidence in my writing ability has gone up a notch or so since I don't know what was meant by a need of mechanical improvement, but I know it has something to do with how I phrase and punctuate, which have been things I have been conscious about to a point. I try not to let that bother me, since my writing isn't horrible. It just may not be technically polished from an academic standpoint.
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