Marilyn Vos Savant claims she did a survey, albeit non-scientific, that concluded that people with superior spelling skills possessed no
greater i.q.'s than poor spellers. Spelling is just a function of longterm memory that some have and some don't.
I have to agree with Vos Savant, although I cannot defend my opinion "scientifically", either. I have always said that you either have a "spelling bump" or you don't.
Personally, I had the good fortune to be born with a "spelling bump". My late husband, a fine poet and a Professor of English, was not. So he attributed my spelling ability sometimes to "lack of imagination", or, when he was in a more benign mood, to the fact I had read less Middle English than he had.
I like to think that the latter explanation is closer to the truth.<g>
For one thing, it fits better with the Vos Savant theory about long-term memory function: having seen a word once or twice, people with "spelling bumps" automatically remember how it ought to look on a page. (When someone asks me how to spell a word, I first write it down, to see if it "looks right".) But if you had seen the same word written differently on different occasions (as you would have had you read a lot of Middle English), your "photographic memory" might fail you, by photographing the "wrong" spelling, or too many conflicting spellings.
So, I personally would never think of using spelling ability as a criterion for measuring general intelligence, or even general education (unless the misspellings are too frequent and too egregious).
Grammatical mistakes are of another order, I think. In an educated person, chronically bad grammar, or chronically sloppy writing, can often be an indicator of generally poor reasoning ability. (In uneducated people, it means only that they have no education, not that they are stupid or logically impaired.)
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