What's this invented spelling I keep hearing about? Isn't spelling just supposed to be correct?

The term invented spelling came along in 1971 when some researchers (Chomsky, 1971; Read, 1971) realized that young kids, preschoolers in fact, were writing words before they started to read, when all they knew was the names of the letters. They were truly inventing these spellings, since they came up with them on their own without any teaching. We now use the term to talk about any spelling that a writer comes up with on her own; these spellings don't come out of thin air but are based on what the writer knows about language. The great thing about inventing a spelling rather than asking somebody is that it gets you to think; in fact, first graders who wrote with invented spelling did better on tests of phonics and spelling than those who didn't (Clarke, 1989).  more