This article is about the difficulty of writing English words. Though you know how to pronounce many words, and you probably know roughly what they mean, writing them down correctly is something else. For this, the writing system may well seem to be at fault. In a perfect world, the alphabetic writing system would have a single letter for each speech-sound and one speech-sound for each single letter. Unfortunately this isn’t the case, and accents can make writing problems even more severe. English spelling has to cater for a wide range of English accents, which differ in their goodness of fit with present spelling conventions. The English spelling system has to cater as best it can for phonetic differences between speakers. If people were able to spell as they spoke, there would emerge tons of different written dialects of English (Bauer & Trudgill, 1998).