Decades ago, a generation of UK schoolchildren unwittingly took part in an initiative aimed at boosting reading skills – with lasting consequences
Throughout my life, my mum has always been a big reader. She was in three or four book clubs at the same time. She’d devour whatever texts my siblings and I were studying in school, handwrite notes for our lunchboxes and write in her diary every night. Our fridge door was a revolving display of word-of-the-day flashcards. Despite this, she also was and remains, by some margin, the worst speller I have met.
By the time I was in primary school, she was already asking me to proofread her work emails, often littered with mistakes that were glaringly obvious to me even at such a young age. It used to baffle me – how could this person, who races through multiple books a week and can quote Shakespeare faultlessly, possibly think “me” is spelt with two Es?
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