Spelling is spelling, nothing more.
It isn’t authorship and nor
Does it amount to writing, it
Isn’t wisdom, truth or wit.
Writing that’s beautiful, or true,
Has its influence on you
Not, for heaven’s sake, because
Of how the bloody spelling was!
I hope I have convinced you, in previous chapters, that we don’t read primarily phonically. Reading is not done phonically in the first instance, though phonic back-up may be quite important for purposes other than word recognition. (eg Adams 1990, Ellis 1993, Smith 2004) We read simple text directly - visually - all the way to meaning. Biology is always economic - the most direct, and cheapest route will be the one taken. Exactly similar arguments can be deployed to show that we also primarily spell directly - visually - taking the most direct route from meaning to text through visual symbol. We do not assemble phonemes then translate them into graphemes and take them to writing, we take language straight to graphemes from meaning. We do not take meaning, make it into sound, translate that into letters and write; we take meaning straight to letters (or even whole words and morphemes) and write them. What we are talking about here is the bottom half of the diagram we last met at figure 3.3 (the whole thing is at appendix one).
Figure 5.1 Producing speech or writing from meaning.
Language, held in semantic code, as meaning, in the semantic system, activates its graphemic code representation (its representation as visual symbol) in the visual output lexicon (a mental store of language as visual symbols). From there it may directly activate its motor code (its representation as instructions to the fingers to execute that symbol) and thence the muscles of writing themselves. This is the direct, visually mediated and most usual route. It is the way fluent spellers do the trick. (And it is the eyes which tell us when we have gone wrong. If it looks wrong it is wrong. We operate a ‘when in doubt, write it out’ spellcheck, in fact, and we do this because we spell visually.)