Does spelling really matter? Fourteen-year-old Zaila Avant-garde has just become the first African-American to win a famous spelling competition in the USA. But is the contest pointless?
The spelling queen bee making history
Does spelling really matter? Fourteen-year-old Zaila Avant-garde has just become the first African-American to win a famous spelling competition in the USA. But is the contest pointless?
The girl on stage stood thinking for a minute. She had just been asked to spell a word. Slowly she said:
"M - U - R - R - A - Y - A"
The judges nodded. Zaila was correct. She jumped up and twirled around. She had just won the Scripps Spelling Bee.
Zaila Avant-garde is 14 and comes from Louisiana. At a young age, she found she liked spelling and started a hobby. But last week, she won one of the biggest spelling competitions in America.
The Scripps Spelling Bee has been running for 96 years. On Thursday last week, Zaila became the first African-American to win it. The only other Black person ever to win was Jody-Anne Maxwell from Jamaica in 1998.
Zaila's winning word was murraya, which is a kind of tropical tree. The one she found hardest was nepeta, a breed of mint.
Zaila is not only a spelling champion. She wants to be a professional basketball player and already holds three world records for her dribbling skills.
Does spelling really matter?
No! It does not really matter if you misspell a word. The important thing is that somebody understands what you mean. Lots of people who were bad at spelling have been hugely successful. F Scott Fitzgerald is one of the most famous authors in the world. He was famously bad at spelling. So was Jane Austen! This is proof it is not so important.
Yes! It might sound odd, but spelling rules are there to make things easier. Before there were fixed dictionaries, all words could be spelt how people thought they should sound. This was very confusing! One word could be written in endless ways. Now, we have set rules. They might be hard sometimes. But life would be even harder without them.
The spelling queen bee making history
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