How are you at spelling?

[Tom]

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 spelling(s?). 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

[Yankee]

Hi Tom

[prezbucky]

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)
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Billie Jean is not my lover. Hee.

[Rosalisa]

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


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If you want to change the world, be one of the change.

[Yankee]

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. 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:

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.

Have you seen that poem before, Tom? Do you understand it? 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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Amy
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ESL teacher, translator, and a native speaker of American English

[lost_soul]

[Nicholas]

[lost_soul]

BTW, here is a good list of such words: http://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 .
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Alex

I like exercise

[Pamela]

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.

[NinaZara]

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 "dissappoint".

[edison_chen_e_c]

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'.

[aleaf]

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. At that time I really hope to tell them I can spell "characteristic and enthusiasm" correctly.
And there are some words such as vehicle, restaurant and pronunciation ...I always spell them incorrectly. I spell them as vihecle, resturant and prononciation.
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Try to change youself before you try to change others.

[Ralf]

If that helps, I think I often suffer from the same performens weeknes
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Test of English as a Foreign Language
TOEFL Preparation & TOEFL Vocabulary
Learn more about: Ralf Breheny

[auldglory]

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.)
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And so they buried Hector, Breaker of Horses.

[SkiIucK]

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!
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If you find any typographical or grammatical errors in my post, please let me know.