Why do people misspell?

Why do people misspell? 

Jonathan Bond? 

Over the years, the English language has evolved to become the second most spoken language worldwide. This directly raises the question, why do people misspell? There have been many arguments over the years.

The main argument is that words in the English language are not spelt how they sound. For instance, with the word "information" many people would assume it is spelt "informashion" by the way it is pronounced. The fact that words often do not sound like they are spelt causes havoc for people that are new to the language, such as children and foreigners. Many critics argue that the English language is irregular because words are not spelt how they sound.  These critics use the "ghoti" argument which states 'ghoti' can be translated into 'fish'. The 'gh' in 'cough' is pronounced 'ph'. The 'o' in 'women' is pronounced 'I'. And the 'ti' in 'information' is pronounced 'sh', thus forming the word "phish".

Another common argument for misspelling is age. Lise Abrams, Meagan T. Farrell, & Sara J. Margolin from the Florida University found in some recent research (http://www.psych.ufl.edu/~abrams/Research/abrams_farrell_margolin_10.pdf) that middle-old age adults misspell more commonly than young adults. This could occur because old age adults sometimes acquire mental illnesses such as dementia. This research obviously discounts children because they have not yet required a firm grasp of the language.

Something that I found during my research on language on the internet is that people purposely misspell words. The main purpose, that I found, of misspelling was to achieve a humorous effect. Recently on the internet, and especially on video games, people have been using the phrase "get rekt". Many find this phrase humorous because the word 'wrecked' is shortened down to 'rekt' but is still pronounced the same way. The phrase "u wot m8?" has also become famous because of the way it is spelt. The fact that a number is used in a word, yet it is still pronounced the same, achieves a humorous effect and is also easier to type.

Related to the point above, another reason why people misspell is because of the internet. A government study in 2013 found that 83% of British households had access to the internet, which proves the internet takes up so much of our lives. Therefore, with the rising number of people purposely misspelling words, it makes it difficult for children using the internet to get a true understanding of spelling. 
One common assumption when looking at spelling is that if you are intelligent you should automatically be adept at spelling. However, this is not the case. Spelling is not related to intelligence. J. David Houser found that, in a recent study (http://www.jstor.org/stable/994410), many intelligent people could not spell as well as first assumed. Houser gave people 25 words each to spell, no homophones or deliberately misleading questions, and he found that intelligence does not affect spelling ability, at least not in this case.

In conclusion, there are many reasons for people misspelling words. Sometimes it is done on purpose for a comedic effect but sometimes there are deeper reasons to why people misspell words.