Blurb:

This chapter looks at the plight of the most common of our English vowels, the unstressed Schwa.The schwa is the most frequent vowel of spoken English, so we need a way to represent it in writing, but no system of spelling could possibly represent all the chaotic variability of spoken schwas. The author argues for a rule whereby whenever one variant of a vowel is recognizable as its “full” pronunciation, it is that pronunciation that should be represented by the spelling.