Why you should learn to spell
by kipress
After circling umpteen incorrectly swapped instances of “your” and “you’re” in my first-year students’ screenplays recently, I engaged in water-cooler ranting with other instructors about spelling. Now, creative writing may not be the class where spelling counts the most, but don’t think that I don’t notice. Oh, I notice. As the the students in my second-year class now know from this morning, I am intimately familiar with the difference between an en-dash and an em-dash, and will fistfight typesetters on it if necessary. So yes, I notice when you don’t know the difference between a possessive and a plural, or “complement” and “compliment.”
Creative writing students sometimes come in with the attitude that, you know, it’s creative, so why does it have to be correct? Bad spelling tells me that you don’t care about your writing, that you aren’t serious about it, and that you probably don’t read very much, because the best way to spell well is to read lots. And if you don’t read much, how good will your writing be? Bad spelling crushes confidence: any confidence your reader may have had in you is gone.
I spent a while in the publishing trenches, reading the slushpile and writing the rejection letters. Manuscript readers get paid nothing or next to it, and have a gigantic pile of work in front of them, and it’s a thankless job. So, a spelling mistake in your cover letter? REJECT…. without even turning to your manuscript.
The Press Gallery 
Why not fail them like the other classes? I think the auto-fail makes most people straighten out pretty quickly… although I’m pretty sure I’ve handed you things with spelling errors.
Also, I would be interested in finding out about being a manuscript reader/getting into the publishing world.
I haven’t found it in my heart yet to fail on spelling errors. It may come to that.
Being a manuscript reader: publishing is a low-budget business, so if you offer to work for free, that is a good way to get experience that you can build on. The literary journals, too, not just the book publishers, are a good source of volunteer work.
Don’t ignore “admin assistant,” “office manager” or stuff like that — often these positions include a wide variety of duties in a small office, and probably include reading mss. Proofreading is also a task that some publications might farm out to volunteers or freelancers.
In Toronto, I knew a few people who worked for a while as proofreaders at Harlequin–apparently more lucrative a position than most entry-level publishing jobs, though that was a while ago, so things could have changed.
Whenever I make a mistake like writing “compliment” instead of “complement,” I like to read a few posts on the Free Press’s website, or YouTube.
Then I can’t help but think of “Flowers for Algernon.”