Miss bp
in the vagaries of English spelling has no real relevance on a forum which helps parents address their child's reading and spelling problems.
Some people have said that they find them of interest.
The work you have done is of interest, perhaps, to adults who want to know how spelling evolved. You are clearly promoting a cause but I don't think that MN is the place to do it.
I have looked at your books and reviews- most of which are NOT good! Abd you appear to be self-published. I wonder if you are in danger of over stepping the mark here with self-publicity for your work using this forum as a vehicle?
I never mention my books on here. I have been very busy for the past two days and cannot remember if it was u or someone else who asked me a little while ago,
Masha- have you thought about writing a book on this as you spend a huge amount of time "educating" people- maybe you could actually make it pay?
(It may even have been earlier on this thread, but it's become too long to search through.)
I did wonder at the time if u perhaps knew that I had and were trying to trick me into talking about them, so u could get me banned from this forum.
I replied (and kept a copy, because it was rather long):
--- I have, as Mrz has pointed out. (I just hope that her doing so won't get me banned from this forum.)
Foolish though this may seem, I am much more concerned about 'educating' than making money. I first became annoyed and pre-occupied by the inconsistencies of English spelling when I first started to learn English at the age of 14, but it wasn't until my premature retirement from teaching (mostly English and modern languages in Dorset for nearly 20 years) that I had the means and leisure to study them and their origins in depth. My retirement happened to coincide with renewed media pre-occupation with literacy failure in the 90's and blaming it on poor teaching, while totally ignoring the alphabetically irregular nature of English spelling.
I think what finally pushed me into this, when my health began to improve a bit and I was considering what to do with my life, although I had a small pension, was some phonics expert saying that the rest of Europe has higher literacy standards because they use nothing but phonics. She was suggesting that if the same happened over here, the results would be the same, which to me showed abysmal lack of awareness of the differences between English spelling and all other European writing systems. I felt somebody needed to do some 'educating'.
Doing research and writing a book seemed the best way of doing it at the time. But the internet has given me opportunities for 'educating' in ways which no fairly academic book ever could before.
This is very annoying to people who still like to pretend that learning to read and write English is no different from other alphabetically written languages. - It makes it much harder for them to sell their piggies in a poke. But lots of teachers really appreciate what I have done and continue to do.