The top secret to spelling is
aesthetics. The difference between good spellers and bad spellers isn't memorizing a bunch of
wonky rules; drop that shit like a bad habit. It's all about their ability to tell the way a word is
supposed to look. Your English teachers memorized all those rules, but there's no shortage of English teachers who are poor spellers.
Allow me to
qualify this. I'm sure you've heard that the only steadfast rule in English is that every rule has an exception. And it's possible you may have also heard that people rely on images rather than individual letters to read quickly (Remember that "Can you raed tihs?"
chainmail?). Well,
let's put two and two together here. Every language has its own aesthetics. When you look at something in a foreign language, there's a good chance you might be able to identify it as, say, Korean, German, Chinese, or Japanese. You don't actually know these languages (most likely), but just by the shape of things you can tell.
Here's a
real-world example, as well as one of the most famous rules. "'I' before 'E' except after 'C.'" Well, sure, this will work for "receive" or "pier." But really, you have to
weigh the benefits of such a rule against any sort of
weird exceptions, yes? Not just "W" either. "Sleigh" and "
Raleigh" are the same way. On the other hand, consider this from the perspective of aesthetics. Try transposing the "I" and "E" in any of these examples. Barring your being dyslexic, it looks dumb, right? Thought so.
Of course, there's a bit of a catch to this method. If you're not typing in a fixed-width font it can be hard to catch silly little typing errors that result in things that aren't really words. Use fixed-width. Of course, if you want to bitch and moan about how this doesn't work for you blah blah blah,
feel free to do so to your heart's content.