Writing

"Everybody agrees that English spelling is horrible."
"There have been almost as many proposals for spelling reform as there are rewrites of Esperanto. (Tellingly, there has been precisely one success in each category-- Noah Webster and Ido-- and neither caught on universally.) Most of these proposals spend their energy fixing what isn’t broken. For instance, they search hard for clever new ways of spelling the ch sound-- even though ch does the job just fine in hundreds of languages. Or, they insist on ’correcting’ the Great Vowel Shift, using Italian values for the vowels."
"Whenever the subject comes up, someone is sure to bring up all the words in -ough, or George Bernard Shaw’s ghoti-- a word which illustrates only Shaw’s wiseacre ignorance. English spelling may be a nightmare, but it does have rules, and by those rules, ghoti can only be pronounced like goatee."
"The purpose of this page is to describe those rules-- to explain the system behind English spelling, the rules that tell you how to pronounce a written word correctly over 85% of the time."