Spelling! One of those words guaranteed to strike fear in your heart – especially when followed by ‘Test’.
I have to confess, right here and now: I’m no natural speller. Other people might be able to spell ‘onomatopoeia’ without looking it up in the dictionary, but not me. In fact, if it wasn’t for spellcheckers and dictionaries, I’d have to go audio.
But unlike lots of bad spellers, I can’t pretend spelling doesn’t matter; because I know it does. At best, bad spelling makes you look lazy, sloppy and careless. At worst, it interferes with clarity (cardinal sin).
So I do my best, and persevere (just had to spellcheck that!). No one’s going to call me illiterate!
English spelling isn’t straightforward and obvious, but if you’re aware of the pitfalls you can learn to avoid them.
Just Look and Say/Say and Write – it’s easy-peasy
If only it were! Unfortunately, English pronunciation and spelling are not equivalent, even though lots of people believe they are. Take my mother: she’s a born speller. And if I ask her how to spell something, she’ll say ‘Exactly as it sounds.’ Very helpful, I don’t think. Might work for ‘cat’, but it sure as apples doesn’t work for ‘cough’, or ‘recipe’ or ‘millennium’.
So – just follow the rules!
Er, right. You mean infallible rules like ‘I before E except after C’? Great – so long as you don’t want to write ‘foreign’ or ‘receipt’ or ‘sufficient’ or any of the other exceptions. And there are a fair few.
According to The Simplified Spelling Society, there are 90 basic spelling patterns and at least 3500 common words that just don’t follow the rules. So we have to learn them.
Like these:
• The long ‘EE’ sound can be ‘seen’, ‘bean’, ‘weird’, ‘me‘, ‘ski‘ or ‘quay‘
• The long ‘OO’ sound can be ‘food’, ‘rude’, ‘fruit’, ‘blue‘ or ‘shoe‘
• The ‘-ER’ ending can be ‘mother‘, ‘actor‘, ‘popular‘ or ‘theatre‘
And then you’d do well to keep your eyes peeled for:
• words with silent letters, eg: gnaw, know, comb, debt, write
• words with swallowed syllables, eg:
every – pronounced evry
Wednesday – pronounced wensday
vegetable – pronounced vegtable
• words that sound the same but have different meanings (homophones), eg:
principle and principal
there and their
cite, site and sight
stationery and stationary
And the Award for Causing the Most Spelling Problems goes to…
Consonant Doubling!
Simple rule: when you want to show that a stressed vowel is short, double the consonant.
So you have ‘bitter’, ‘latter’, ‘rotten’, ‘running’, ‘silly’.
But we can’t follow it all the time. For instance, it’s:
• ‘abbey’ and ‘rabbit’, but ‘habit’ and ‘robin’
• ‘giddy’ and ‘sodden’, but ‘body’ and ‘modern’
And there are heaps of other exceptions! Masha Bell’s English Spelling Problems site lists 379 common words that obey the consonant doubling rule and 376 words that disobey the rule.
So, what to do?
If it doesn’t all come naturally (and why should it?) then try this:
1 Be honest – admit it if your spelling is weak. Erratic spelling does NOT make you a bad person! No matter what your school teachers wanted you to believe.
2 Be aware – learn the words that cause you the biggest trouble. The ‘I and E’ stuff gets me if I don’t pay attention. And it took me ages to learn that ‘amount’ only has one ‘m’. How about you?
3 Be careful – use spellcheckers and dictionaries. If you’re not sure – look it up! Always spellcheck. (Yes – even emails.) If there’s a choice in spelling something – ‘recognise’ or ‘recognize’ – choose one and be consistent.
Remember – If you can’t be good, be careful!