Depending on your age and the educational system in your area, you may or may not have had primary school classes devoted to developing good handwriting. Before the invention of the typewriter – and later the computer keyboard – people had to be able to write down what they wanted to communicate or remember. While the printing press allowed mass distribution of texts, anything done by an individual involved a pen or pencil, a piece of paper, and the ability to use one’s hand to form the shapes of the letters on the page. As the trend continues towards electronic communication that’s typed into an e-mail or “thumbed” into a text message, researchers are starting to look at the difference in learning and development that might be connected to this change.

As we’ve mentioned before, the act of writing out a word will help you remember how to spell it correctly. Your body is involved as well as your brain: the movements of your hand as you trace the correct configuration of each letter, the input of your eyes as you watch your hand move, and the visual and tactile sense of the proper order of those letters in the word form connections between your physical memory (sometimes called “muscle memory”) and your brain’s memory processing and storage. There was a good reason that teachers used to assign students a list of words to “write out ten times each” – that repetition strengthens the memory links, and helps move the knowledge of the proper spelling of a word into long-term memory, so that it can be accessed when reading or listening to conversation as well as when writing.

When you’re trying to memorize the spelling of a new word, or any list of information, try writing it down one or more times. You’ll find that this exercise will increase the speed at which you commit things to memory, and improve your ability to recall them as well.

Cross-posted at the Ultimate Memory blog.

Mangen, A. and Velay, J. Digitizing Literacy: Reflections on the Haptics of Writing. Advances in Haptics (2010).

In the last post, we covered some of the common spelling rules and exceptions for making English words plural. Today, we’ll look at more of these rules and give examples to help you understand when they apply.

Note: Remember that there are exceptions to every spelling rule, and these are only general guidelines.

If the word already ends in S, add ES to the end of the word.

kiss / kisses
campus / campuses
abyss / abysses
loss / losses
atlas / atlases

If the word ends in IS, change the ending to ES for the plural form.

analysis / analyses
axis / axes
hypothesis / hypotheses
oasis / oases
parenthesis / parentheses

If the word is an irregular plural, you just have to learn it!
We’re not listing all of the words with irregular plurals, but these are some of the most common ones, and ones that give people the most difficulty in spelling:

woman / women
alumnus / alumni
sheep / sheep
fungus / fungi
child / children
tooth / teeth
radius / radii

One final note on plurals: there are many words that we’re used to seeing mostly in their plural form, and often people make the mistake of thinking that the word is actually singular. A good example of this is the word media, which is the plural of the word medium. Because many people refer to “the media” while thinking of the idea of news or broadcasting as one whole entity, they assume that the word is singular. However, you should remember that television is only one medium by which news is broadcast. Some other words that get confused this way are data (the plural of datum) and criteria (the plural of criterion). This last word is often misused in a work environment.

Other words appear most often in their singular forms, and people are often unsure of the correct plural form. Examples include maximum (plural: maxima), memorandum (plural: memoranda), and addendum (plural: addenda).

Do you have two or more questions about plurals? Leave them in the comments.

Making a word plural in English is easy – you just add an s to the end of the word, right? Well, yes … and no. Many words do follow this simple rule, but often the addition of an s on the end of a word changes the way that word is spelled. Like many rules, there are exceptions, but in this post we’re going to cover some of the basic guidelines for the times when a word’s spelling changes. Learn these guidelines for use in most cases, and make a note of any exceptions you come across (we’ve listed some of the common ones).

If the word ends in an O (with a “long o” sound), add ES to the end of the word.

mosquito / mosquitoes
cargo / cargoes
motto / mottoes
potato / potatoes
tomato / tomatoes
echo / echoes
hero / heroes
volcano / volcanoes

Exceptions: piano, solo, torso, alto, soprano, silo, studio, and cameo only take an S.

If the word ends in an Y after a vowel, just add S. If the word ends in a Y after a consonant, or with the letter cluster quy, change the Y to IES.

spray / sprays
yesterday / yesterdays
cowboy / cowboys
toy / toys
monkey / monkeys
valley / valleys
turkey / turkeys

quandary / quandaries
ally / allies
steady / steadies
country / countries
party / parties
industry / industries
soliloquy / soliloquies
obsequy / obsequies

If the word ends in a single F or in the letters FE, the plural is VES. If the word ends in FF, just add an S.

knife / knives
shelf / shelves
life / lives
thief / thieves
wife / wives
leaf / leaves

fluff / fluffs
plaintiff / plaintiffs
staff / staffs

Exceptions: There are rather a lot of exceptions in this category! Here are a few of the ones you’ll see most often. These words are pluralized by adding an S.

giraffe, chief, surf, hoof, roof, gulf, grief, belief

We’ll go over more rules and exceptions in the next post.

Prefixes are units of meaning that are attached to the front of a word to change its definition. The word prefix itself contains a prefix: pre-, a Latin root meaning “before.” Prefixes come before the main word; a suffix comes after the main word. Both prefixes and suffixes are types of affix (pronounced AH-fix), a linguistic term for something attached to a word or another part of a word (the verb affix, here pronounced uh-FIX, means “to attach”).

Prefixes are added to the main words (also called “stem words”) but don’t change the spelling of those words. This can cause a problem in spelling when the prefix ends with the same letter that starts the main word. One of the most common occurrences of this is with the prefixes dis- and mis-. Even when adding the prefix causes a doubled letter, don’t change it. Both the prefix and the main word are independent bits of information. A good example is the word misspell – you are mis-spelling the word if you only use one s.

Mis- is a prefix that means “wrong” or “off target.” If you are walking through your house in the dark, you might misstep and accidentally put your foot on your dog’s tail.

Dis- is a prefix that means “apart from” or “not.” If you are not happy with the food you’re served in a restaurant, you are dissatisfied with your meal.

The doubled-letter problem is most often an issue with a prefix ending in s, but as long as you remember that the addition of a prefix does not change the spelling of the main word, you won’t have any difficulties. Here are some other common prefixes and their meanings:

Trans- means “across.” Before the invention of the airplane, you had to take a transatlantic voyage to get between New York and London.

Two prefixes that are often confused are inter- (“between, among”) and intra- (“within, into”). To help you remember which is which, think of the words interview (an interaction between two people) and intravenous (something injected into a vein).

Another often-confused pair of prefixes is ante- and anti-. The first one means “before”) – think of the words antebellum (“before the war”) and antecedent (“previous, coming first”). The more common prefix anti- is easier to remember; it means “against.” To fix this prefix in your mind, think of the words antiseptic (“against infection”) and antisocial (“disliking being with people”).

Prepare yourself by perfecting your prefixes, and you’ll find that your ability to correctly spell words will continue to improve in precision.

You probably use computers, iPhones, and text messaging to write many of the things you formerly would have hand-written or typed on a typewriter (and if you’re not in your 30s or older, it’s possible that you’ve never even seen a typewriter!). Each of these electronic devices and applications have built-in spell-check systems to help you avoid misspelling words; word processing applications even have built-in grammar-checking functions to keep you from writing an ungrammatical sentence. While these features are useful, they can also be detrimental. If you’re never required to correct your own spelling, you might never learn the correct spelling of a word. That’s why we recommend that you turn off the “autocorrect” feature of the spell-check function on any word processing application you use, and correct yourself as you type. This way, the words you misspell will be highlighted, but the system won’t automatically replace them with what it thinks is the right word.

Back in the days before spell-check, people had to use a dictionary to look up the correct spelling of a word. Many good dictionaries now have websites that are easy to use and provide the information you need at a moment’s notice. If you use a print dictionary, make sure you have a relatively new version, because words are constantly added to the English language, and their meanings and usage also evolve over time. Even the spelling of words can change; for example, some dictionaries now say that alright is an acceptable spelling of all right (as in “It’s alright if your friend eats dinner with us”), though we disagree. However, in time even this altered spelling may be added to the OED and become part of the “official” English language.

A good dictionary will give you the phonetic spelling of the word, showing you where the word breaks into syllables and how to pronounce the word. Learn to pronounce words correctly, and you’ll improve your ability to remember how to spell them. When you mispronounce or misspell a word, your listeners and readers will assume that you don’t know what it means, either. By using a dictionary, you’ll find all the information you need to thoroughly learn a word. Look for these features of a print or on-line dictionary:

– a breakdown of the word into its component syllables
– a phonetic spelling of the standard pronunciation of the word
– which part of speech the word belongs to (noun, verb, etc.)
– the different definitions for the word
– usage examples for each definition
– the etymology of the word
– synonyms, antonyms, and other related words and concepts