Quote Originally Posted by Tzigone View Post
And I do think it's at the expense of the character's expertise, though not to a huge degree. Being a bad speller doesn't make one a bad reporter, but you can't really say equally-good-at-prose-and-investigating, but one version can spell and one version cannot are the same professional quality. One is, at least, marginally better.
Being able to spell correctly is really just a small piece of being a good writer or prosaist, perhaps even the smallest, at least insofar as that it's relatively easy and straightforward to fix. Likewise, the best speller in the world might be totally unable to string the words together into an interesting or even coherent whole. There is at least one Hugo-winning author that I know of who is dyslexic, and depends on first hunting the red squiggles in the word processor, and then sending of their texts to an editor for proofreading.