Does spelling give you a hard time? You’re not alone. Due to our growing reliance on autocorrect and spellcheckers, we generally pay little attention to spelling rules and patterns these days.
Of course, you might wonder why you should bother to learn how to spell “committed” (which is with double “m” and double “t” by the way) since your spellchecker will automatically fix it for you?
For one thing, great spelling gives you confidence in writing and typing without the looming fear that you will miss a misspelling and embarrass yourself. These seven tips will help you improve spelling and get to be a spelling Master — something to boast about to your friends.
Use a Dictionary
Print dictionaries might be soon going extinct but until then nothing can match a good, bulky dictionary. If you don’t own one, there are great online ones: Merriam-Webster and Oxford to name a few.
Spelling is not only dependent on how good your memory is. Because your mind can recall only so many words, it’s important to have a reliable reference point for when memory abandons you.
Get Your Mental Orthographic Images Right
Researchers argue that although we learn spelling rules at school, like the notorious “I before E except after C”, our brains don’t refer to these rules when we write or type out words. Rather, our brains resort to their own mental orthographic images bank.
It’s a bank with photographs of every word you know. Consider these mental images as slides that come up in your brain and tell you things like, “Hmm, ‘noticable’ doesn’t seem quite right, does it?” Because you’ve read and possibly written “noticeable” the right way many times, this image in your head will pop up and insist that this is not how it’s supposed to be written.
To ensure you get your MOIs right you need extended, focused, and repeated exposure to a word. That’s why flashcards are so popular and effective in teaching spelling. The good news is that you don’t really need printed flash cards. Many programs and online tools help you study words with virtual flash cards equally effectively.
Pick a Side
It’s important that you stick to one spelling of English. Are you using British, Australian or American English? Make up your mind and stick to that spelling practice to ensure your writing is uniform and misspelling-free.
Know Your Weak Spots
Even the best spellers — and we’re guessing Spelling Bee champions, too — can misspell words with the ever-confusing suffixes often referred to in pairs: -able and -ible-, -ent and -ant, -ance and -ence, and –tial and –cial.
So, if you’re stumbling upon the spelling of “beneficial,” “dependable,” and “elegance,” double check you’ve spelled them correctly.
Over time you will be able to get it right, as long as you go about practicing in the right way. In the meantime you can brush up your spelling rules to give you a hint. For instance, verbs that end in –y such as apply and ally will form a noun with an –ance suffix; appliance and alliance in this case.
All-around Practice
A common mistake people make when learning to spell is that they only focus on the orthography of the word, leaving out pronunciation and actual word production. To learn a word’s spelling is not enough. You need to write it out, and you need to hear it and say it too. This exposure to all linguistic aspects of a word means you can recall its spelling even without having to write it out or spell it out loud later.
Be a Smarter Speller
Smart studying means that you learn with less effort and in less time. Instead of indiscriminately practicing your spelling with a jumble of unrelated words, try learning spelling in groups. For instance, learn all words that end in –ious together. Such a list would include words such as “deleterious,” “ingenious,” “captious,” and “voracious.”
Test Yourself Often
To make the most headway in your spelling study, you need to monitor your progress, so it’s crucial that you test your spelling skills often. You can do so with online quizzes or with a friend or parent. By testing your spelling with another person, be it a tutor or a friend, it ensures you get feedback instantly. This will help you to recognize your weaknesses so that you can then focus on them in your next spelling practice.
Over to you. What’s your go-to strategy for learning to spell?
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