Although the literature has characterized how apparently innocent respellings of respondent data (in attempts to capture either the ‘flavor’ or authenticity of performance) inevitably demote assessments of the speaker's status and intelligence (and in some cases actually mar intelligibility of the transcript), more recent work shows how variation in spelling, like other levels of language variety, reflects social practices in speech communities. Although the social identities and stances thus encoded are not simple (i.e., they do not invariably reflect one ‘writer’ stance or demand one interpretation), they offer another mode for the investigation of language in social space and practice.