How are you at spelling?

Hi

Are you good at spelling or do you depend on MS Word a lot? Let’s discuss some interesting way of helping students improve their spellingcolor=red. As for me, I often get confused whether some word would end in “se” or “ce”. Just today I asked my students the spelling of paradise and more than 50% voted for “paradice” and eventually I lost my confiden"ce" whether I kenw the spelling myself.

Tom

Hi Tom

I know this phenomenon very well. :lol: I experienced it more than once in Germany – most often in situations where there was a common “Denglisch” expression which is incorrect in English. There you are, standing in front of 15 or 20 people, most of whom disagree with or simply refuse to believe what you’re telling them. You’re outnumbered. :shock: Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it, and you’ll figure out your own ways to deal most effectively with it.

As for spelling, I consider myself to be pretty good at it, but one of my brothers is an absolutely horrendous speller. (Therefore, there apparently is no such thing as a “spelling gene”. If there were, wouldn’t good or bad spelling run in the family? :lol:) But I think even excellent spellers have to look up words on occasion – just to make sure. English spelling simply isn’t very logical.

I think the thing that helps most is reading. Sometimes, when I find myself unsure about a spelling (and don’t have a dictionary handy), I will write the word down two different ways in order to decide which one “looks” right. Being able to decide which one “looks” right comes from reading.
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Some of the toughest words for me to spell are those that I’ve never (or rarely, and not recently) read. Reading is a great way to learn new/difficult words.

(assuming that the editor is on his/her toes and catching all the misspellings in the script)

Yeah…i think so…reading improves our spelling ability…because we see a word more than once, so it enriches our memory…

:smiley:

Hi Tom

You also mentioned MS Word. Spell checkers are handy tools, aren’t they? They can be very helpful for both bad spellers and people who are all thumbs on the keyboard. And they’re doubly handy for people with both disabilities. :lol: It’s a mistake, though, to place too much trust in them – they definitely don’t catch everything. And sometimes spell checkers make odd suggestions – especially if you’ve spelled something extremely badly.

There is a funny poem floating around on the Internet about spell checkers. I think I’ve posted it before, but here it is again:

[i]Ode to my spell checker

Eye halve a spelling checker
It came with my pea sea.
It plainly marks four my revue miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a quay and type a word and weight for it to say
Weather eye yam wrong oar write.
It shows me strait a weigh as soon as a mist ache is maid.
It nose bee fore two long and eye can put the error rite.
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it,
I am shore your pleased to no.
Its letter perfect awl the way.
My checker told me sew.[/i]

Have you seen that poem before, Tom? Do you understand it? :shock: Just try it out with your MS Word spell checker and see what happens. My MS Word spell checker finds exactly ZERO spelling errors – naturally because all of the words are correctly spelled.
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Hi, Amy

Wow, I do the same thing ! And it works 90 % . Sometimes I can spell right a word I have no definite idea of what it means.

This is funny, Amy. :smiley:

BTW, here is a good list of such words: kyleneprivett.org/Homophones.xls

Eye want to no awl about words like that !!! Eye will right like that awl the time because it’s cool ! Am eye write ? Eye hope eye halve not maid any mist aches .

Hi Tom,
I am said to have a knack for writing correctly in any language I speak except the cases when I make some slip-ups over my inattention. Even If I come across any new word I can write it on a hunch and often hit the mark as the sounding of the word gives me a big hand. But ,to be on the safe side, I have to look up words fairly often when writing business correspondence or making translations just to make sure the spelling is impeccable and there is no way to get into a mess.
Reading is reputedly an infallible remedy that significantly brings along your spelling, especially if you have an excellent visual memory. Another effective way is writing dictations as many as possible to let the hand get used to writing words subconsciously.

Tom,

You’re an English teacher? I hope I don’t get into trouble for saying this, but I thought you were a VERY mature 10-year-old! I don’t know where I got that impression. Funny.

No wonder you sound so poised.

Anyway, back to your question, as far as my memory allows me, I don’t remember having problems in spelling. It’s either I know it, or I don’t.

But! Since I started living in Japan, I developed a problem of not being able to remember words with double letters, like “professor”. I got confused whether I should write it with an extra “f”, or not. Another word I usually got confused is “dis[color=red]sappoint”.

Thanks Amy, for the good tip! And I agree, reading helps the most. But I have to admit, I read less and less of English book nowadays. Most of my collection now are in Japanese.

A girl has got to choose.

As a student I think my ability of spellings is not bad, at lease I know the adverb of ‘true’ is ‘truly’ but not ‘truely’.

Sometimes I forget how to spell a word which is pretty easy when I stand in front of a huge crowd. And every time I will feel I am sweating off my forehead. :oops: At that time I really hope to tell them I can spell “characteristic and enthusiasm” correctly. :smiley:
And there are some words such as vehicle, restaurant and pronunciation …I always spell them incorrectly. I spell them as vihecle, resturant and prononciation. :roll:

If that helps, I think I often suffer from the same performens weeknes :o

I am a terrible speller. I once was booted out of a spelling bee in the first round by misspelling fabric. The killer thing is that “normal,” “easy” words are what get me. Now when we start talking about the ventral subnucleus of the medial geniculate body, I’ll be golden.

(Maybe I just introduced a few new idiomatic expressions to some of y’all.)

Hi, all!
Hardly do I ever misspell any word, for I devote a lot of time to the spelling of each single word. However, if I stumble upon a dubious word, I often use Yankee’s method, it’s very useful! :stuck_out_tongue: