Anne Trubek Use Your Own Language Analysis

Is it the color gray, or maybe its grey? Who knows, as there are many different variations to spell all words in the English language. As Anne Trubek states, “English spelling is a terrible mess anyway, full of arbitrary contrivances and exceptions that outnumber rules” (Trubek). Over the last 200 years, there have been many discrepancies that have come up all over the English language. And as Trubek tries to convince readers in “Use Your Own Words” through extensive research and personal experiences, she fails in trying to explain what needs to change about the standardization of spelling.

Trubek’s work tries to appeal to the younger generation such as pre-teens and so on. The current generation today is the most knowledgeable with the technology

Technology is one of the biggest reasons of why standardized spelling is where it’s at today. With the use of autocorrect, it is changing the way we “read and write, and must spelling” (Trubek). Standardized spelling is heavily enforced in autocorrect with all its complex rules and such. No one ever pays attention to the rules so why should there be rules in the first place? That’s how the English language works. There are all these different types of spelling yet the current generation pays no heed to any of them.

There are many noticeable changes from Noah Webster’s initial proposition for standardized spelling during the 1700s, right after America got its own independence from Great Britain. Why would the language change for the better, one might ask? Because it would be a way to assert American independence, not just of land but of mind and spirit. "The alteration, however small," wrote Webster in his 1789 "Essay on the Necessity, Advantages, and Practicality of Reforming the Mode of Spelling and of Rendering the Orthography of Words Correspondent to Pronunciation"(Konnikova),

As with positives there are always ways to oppose these standards. The older generation believe that the literature of their time may not be useable or accents from areas native to America may be lost due to learning a totally new language. Standardizations focusing on overwriting these extremities may want to take in the arguments of the ones that struggled to learn the language. The efforts to do all of this is hammered in due to habit or there is no one to set new standards on how to spell as new words arise in the English