I'm not sure, Tallulah, but your process sounds remarkably similar to mine. There are just a handful of words that I seemingly cannot spell-- and they are fairly static. I have no ability to LEARN to spell words, apparently. I either can spell them, or I struggle to recall how they look.
Necessary, said, and a few other common words like February are in that category. I can recall crying because a teacher in 3rd grade repeatedly tried to teach me an auditory method to recall how to spell February, and it simply would not stick with me because of how my brain works.
This is why for me, I have just enough working memory in verbal terms for finger-tracing a word to have worked remarkably well up to the state level in spelling as a spelling bee kid.
Oh-- and another interesting thing is that I can hear a word, but not know that it is THAT word in particular, if you understand what I mean-- so the word "segue" in my mind is phonetically not sounding that way. I had no trouble with it in writing, can spell it fine, etc., but until I heard it used in a way that I understood that the person saying that word that way was READING the word "segue"-- well, that was a total epiphany for me, and I'm a bit amused to note that this isn't the first time that I've experienced some quirky laugh-out-loud funny moment of "Ohhhhhhhhhhh... THAT's what that is..." as a result of my brain's V/S quirks. L. Ron Hubbard didn't write Dune, for example. I was confused about that for a long, long time. LOL!
Last edited by HowlerKarma; 09/04/14 05:37 PM.
