Re: OT-ish: txt - Could it replace Standard Written English?

Christophe Grandsire scripsit:

> I'm not exactly sure if John had the same idea in mind, but to me "top-down" in
> learning writing means learning to write full words first, and only getting to
> the rules of spelling later, if at all, while "bottom-up" means first learning
> the rules of spelling, apply them to words to learn how to write them, and then
> learning the exceptions.
I was talking about rather further "up" than that!

My daughter more or less taught herself to write according to this method.
At first she wrote only loops and squiggles (but still left-to-right
and top-to-bottom, so it was definitely writing, not drawing) and
could read them herself, but nobody else could.  Then came the barely
comprehensible stage, then the many-spelling-errors stage, then the
readily comprehensible stage.  _Then_ she started to learn to write
in school.  But at every stage she was writing compositions, not words or
letters.

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