I have a dark, shameful secret.

No, I’m not a closet ABBA fan, and I don’t watch Dirty Dancing every Saturday evening with the curtains drawn. My secret is far more embarrassing, and I’ve managed to hide it from the world for years. I can’t spell.

Once I passed the age of ten, and stopped learning lists of words from the little red spelling book, my ability to remember new words simply died. There’s a lot to be said for learning things by rote and getting your knuckles rapped in class the next day if you fail. The same goes for multiplication tables. After six years of primary school, asking me what nine eights are is like asking me my name, and I don’t forget that too often, but ask me seventeen times fourteen and I’d need about ten seconds to work it out.

Like a functioning alcoholic, I’ve managed to hide my shame for years. Here’s a few tips for the similarly afflicted:

  1. When posting on a message board or discussion forum, always write into a word processor with a spell checker first, and re-read the post a dozen times - even for short one liners.
  2. Treat email the same way. Email lends itself to quick response, which means the results will not be good when you hit that send button.
  3. Make www.dictionary.com your best friend, or better yet, install the Firefox plug-in or Internet Explorer toolbar.
  4. At work, try to position your desk so no one walks behind you - this way your co-workers will never catch you looking up a four letter word in the dictionary.
  5. Make sure your web browser is configured to not remember previously entered text or searches, otherwise your wife could easily stumble across a drop down list of words you can’t spell.
  6. Keep a list of the words that always confuse you, like license and licence. You would not believe the problems these two words cause me every time I release a new version of PageFour, and there is no reason for it. Advise and advice have never given me any trouble. Maybe they were in the little red book?

One of the first tips given to small software companies is to release early and release often. For me, my affliction meant that this was not possible - I simply could not bring myself to let that early version of PageFour go without a spell checker.

So what’s next? Well, the first step is always admitting you have a problem. So here I am, standing up and announcing to the world: “My name is Darren, and I can’t spell.“