Spelling

Correct spelling is an important part of being a good writer. It helps with communication, and it gives the reader confidence; would you buy from a company which has numerous spelling errors in their advertising material?

There are several reasons for spelling being more complicated in English than other languages. One of them is that a huge number of English words are based on foreign words, and they were slowly adapted.

And before you say, “I’ll just use the computer’s spell checker!”, remember that spell checkers can’t pick up homophones (words with the same sound but different spelling; “to, too, two”)...

STRATEGY #1 - Use your senses

Most experts agree that using as many senses as you can when learning spelling is most successful.

• • Look closely at a word, try to remember what it LOOKS like.

  • Think about the SOUND of a word - this will often give you clues about the spelling.

  • To learn a word, WRITE it or TYPE it - or both. Handwriting the word many times trains your brain not only to recognise it visually, but also helps your hand to write it automatically. (Think of how easy it is to write your name, or even any word ending in “ing”)

The key to correct spelling lies in exposing your brain to the image of a word over and over again. Moreover, the image needs to be quite large (larger than the words of a typical printed book or Web page) and free from other distractions. This is where flashcards are so useful; digital or hand made ones. You will get to the stage where your brain recognises a misspelling “just doesn’t look right”.

STRATEGY #2 - Start a spelling log

Look carefully at your own written work, identify words which you spell incorrectly and personalise this spelling log to your own needs. Write these down (correctly!) and look them over regularly, and write them out several times, even if it’s just with a finger on your leg!

STRATEGY #3 - Organise your lists

Once you’ve identified your personal list of commonly misspelled words, group them together into meaningful lists, where each list has a clear theme. You can then use pictures, stories, and other clever memory devices to glue the words in each list together. The more visually attractive the list, the more your brain will remember the words.

STRATEGY #4 - Timely repetition

Once you have successfully spelled a word on three or four occasions, remove it from your frequently-tested list. You know it. Move on. Other words need to be rehearsed more frequently (daily or weekly, depending on your success rate). Don't test yourself on a given word too frequently though. It is possible to recall words from your short term memory (e.g. if you just tested yourself a half an hour ago) but then fail to recall the word a week later. Leave at least a day between repetitions of any given word.

STRATEGY #5 - Read a lot

Your brain needs exposure to a word up to 15 times before it can produce it confidently, so the more often you are exposed to a certain word, the easier its spelling will become. This is also evidence for avoiding exposure to misspellings, as your brain will, over time, come to accept these as correct!

STRATEGY #6 - Familiarise yourself with some rules

There are many spelling rules (with loads of exceptions as well) which can help with your spelling. Sometimes they’re easy to remember with a little rhyme:

‘i’ before ‘e’ (piece, thief)

Except after ‘c’ (receipt, conceive)

But when A or I is the sound

It's the other way round (weight, height)

Here's a website for some common English spelling rules.

STRATEGY #7 - Morphemic Spelling Rules

"Morphemes are units of meaning. Some words have one such unit, but many have more than one. There is only one morpheme in the adjective glad, while gladly (an adverb) and gladness (a noun) have two morphemes each. All three words share the same root morpheme, glad; but the added '-ly' ending in 'gladly' and '-ness' in 'gladness' turns the first of these two words into an adverb and the second into an abstract noun. . . . “ (Peter Bryant and Terezinha Nunes, "Morphemes and Children's Spelling." The SAGE Handbook of Writing Development, ed. by Roger Beard et al. SAGE, 2009)

FACT: They don’t hold spelling bees in Germany because spelling in Germany follows such predictable rules that it would be too easy!

NOTE: These tips were based on this helpful website: Word Buff

Also check out this website for online spelling exercises of common words: