Marc Salgado was tough. As a soccer referee, he once threw a red card, ejecting a player from a game, when the player used vulgar language about him—in the parking lot before the game had even started.
Salgado was also one of my first editors as a newspaper reporter, and he taught me to spell. It turned out I didn’t need more practice or patience. Sheer terror did the job.
We worked in a big newsroom with scores of reporters at adjoining desks. We wrote on video display terminals without spell-check. I’ll never forget Salgado shouting across the room, over the sound of phone calls and clicking keys:
“Hey Wohlforth! How do you spell publicly?”
In the story I had sent him, I had it spelled it PUBLICALLY. Seemed logical. But I never misspelled that word again.
I didn’t resent Salgado using embarrassment. I loved his intensity and how much he cared. Our newsroom was a fun, energetic, and exacting place to work and learn. It wasn’t for anyone sensitive about criticism, and it produced competent journalists, fast.
The Anchorage Daily News was in a fight to the death with the Anchorage Times. The competition made reporting exhilarating, like running across a tight rope—but with the knowledge that uncompromising editors such as Salgado formed a safety net below. (He died in 1991, while I was working there).
Nor did I resent Salgado’s attacking my spelling. I was ready to get serious and become a pro.
While earning an English degree at Princeton University I had not learned to spell. I considered it beneath me. And Princeton didn’t disagree. While making lots of spelling mistakes, I won magna cum laude honors.
Salgado wouldn’t put up with the errors. He shouted each misspelled word across the newsroom for all to hear. It wasn’t pleasant, but I began applying acute focus to avoid having it happen again. That was good. Examining every word is a key to writing well.
Writing conventions are as essential as they are boring and arbitrary. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization are like clothing. They’re superficial and tell you nothing about the quality of the person inside. But if they’re wrong, most people will never learn about those deeper qualities.
As an editor and coach in 2025, I cannot be as harsh as Salgado was with me. That world is gone. But I still believe that for most of us (research suggests more than 90 percent), we can spell correctly through sheer effort, and the effort itself is worthwhile.
I became a better writer and a better person because Salgado and others like him took me down a peg. He taught attention to detail. Computers check spelling and grammar now, but that doesn’t necessarily produce better writers.
When I work with writers, I sometimes preface my critiques by saying I was brought up in an old-fashioned newsroom and I might be more direct than they’re used to. I think directness is what they’re paying for. If you want to improve as a writer, you must be willing to hear what’s wrong and be willing to do the work to fix it.
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