The reigning champ of the Scripps National Spelling Bee has some advice for spellers and non-spellers alike. Dev Shah, now a ninth-grader in Largo, Florida, won the bee in June in his last year of eligibility, and he has written an essay in the Washington Post on what it takes to be champ. Sure, any competitive speller is going to spend lots of time poring over the dictionary, but trying to memorize everything is futile. Instead, "the skill of guessing is everything," writes Dev. "Though I could—and did—study words for hours on end, I knew my greatest asset would be learning to guess correctly. In stressful situations, sometimes you just have to breathe, steady yourself and leave things to chance."
Of course, making educated guesses helps, and spellers can do that by understanding the "mechanics" of words, including their language of origin, he writes. It's why spellers ask so many questions on stage. For example, for his winning word of "psammophile," Dev learned through his questions that both parts of the word were Greek. "That eliminated about half of the roots, since most roots are either Greek or Latin," he writes.
The $50,000 prize and the accolades are nice, but Dev says the biggest benefit of the bee is that it's prepared him for life. "Competitive spelling teaches you to be unafraid to take risks," he writes. "No matter how well we may think we know something, eventually, we all have to take a guess." Read the full essay, (Or check out other spelling bee stories.)
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