Schiller did not spell according to a commonly accepted dictionary like today's Duden, the corpus on how to spell contemporary German. That it is what I heard.
Why do I need to spell correctly?
Well, if I read a text, I assume that the author put some effort in writing it. Spelling errors are an easy way to see, if the author cared at all or tends to be put in my mind's imbecile category pretty soon. If you do not like someone, it is easy to say to yourself: "Yeah, I knew this guy cannot even spell paralel right". If you want a potential employer to throw your resume right into the next trash bin, make sure it contains some spelling error.
Microsoft to the rescue
Actually, spelling is not hard nowadays. Just use the spell checker of Word. If you write to somebody in a non casual way, the spell checker will remove the spelling errors of your document at a rate of 30 seconds per page including the time you need to click around and assist the corrections of the checker. On the other hand when chatting with your closer friends, they usually care less about formalities.
So do you really need to bother about spelling?
I’d say not really. Although I was taught in school that it is really important to know orthography and be at more than 98% of spelling correctness to be an educated person.
More thought in schools
As Word is ubiquitous, schools should shift from teaching correct spelling of words like paralel to more subtle spelling cases like the difference between lead and led, i.e. cases where spelling really matters. This would give more time to teaching how to write well such as structuring your thoughts and texts. I think this is a lot better than training kids extensively to be a quite imperfect copy of the Duden Volume 1 or Webster’s dictionary. What is even more concerning to me is that kids with good writing structure and style are discouraged by bad grades if they show to be slightly worse copies of the Duden than their fellow students. We need creative kids and not somewhat imperfect copies of the Duden Volume 1.
A word to the computer geeks like me
Spelling errors are like errors detected by the lexer of your compiler. Wording or structural failures are runtime or design errors that are far more destructive. Does anybody of main stream users know anymore about the difference between the Google search entry line and the address line of the browser? People, please, do the same for spelling and stop bugging me about some lexing errors that are "very important". Ok, if spelling correctness goes under 90 percent, this is bad since the spell checker approach gets cumbersome. But befriended teachers tell me that this is quite hard to do for kids after minimal training. Please let me think more about the wording and what I want to say and not look up the crappy Duden website since Word spell checking could be "wrong"... A Duden for Java Lexing is less than two pages. I can do that in my head. The German language lexer database Duden is more than 200 pages in eight point font size. Such lexing is best done by machines not me. Oh, I got to go the sun is shining and my Gmail account got another let’s say 10MB free of charge, while I wrote this. Is that not twice the size of the Duden in Bytes?
und das Schwein drehte sich.
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