Syllabilising, and pronouncing slowly
February usually means a spell of bad weather, and bad spelling. Lots of people write February rather than February. Is there a way of avoiding such an error? One helpful approach when you are unsure about a word is too loud it out very slowly to yourself, emphasizing each syllable, or sound element, of the word. The result can be that the spelling of the word becomes clear, as in Feb/ru/ary. We can apply the same approach to words like tem/per/at/ure and vet/er/in/ary and a great many others.
If even if we do not isolate the syllables of a word, pronouncing a word slowly, carefully, and with a deliberate, heavy emphasis, can sometimes pip. It is not always a reliable guide, partly because so many of us elide bits of words when we speak and it is usually these bits that we misspell, but it is another aid. For example, try pronouncing these words with a heavy emphasis on each sound involved:
Aspirin irrelevant
disastrous laboratory
environment library
government mischievous
history strictly
If there are words you spell incorrectly, the fault may lie in the way you say them, so that you are caught in a circle. Some people read words backwards, trying to make them unfamiliar, or they look for a pattern: we might say asprin, but notice that there is an i before the r as well as the n.
Sometimes, however, the sound of words does not help at all. Particularly I awkward are words that end in -cede, -ceed, and -sede, which all sound just the same at the end. In this case, however, there is a rule to follow, which Involves remembering how to spell four words. Supersede ends in -sede, and exceed, proceed and succeed end in -ceed. All other words that might be Confused with these (words such as precede, concede, recede and secede) all end in -cede.
Plurals
A common area of confusion in spelling is the formation of plurals. This is something that is particularly important to get right because, as you can imagine, a university student who, for example, writes sheeps appears very silly. There is, of course, no argument about that (note, again, that there is no e in the middle of the word: it is argument, not argument). Most nouns form plurals just by adding -s to the singular form:
girl, girls chair, chairs Sunday, Sundays
But a number of nouns ending in f or fe form the plural by changing the ending to ve before adding the -s:
leaf, leaves wife, wives
knife, knives yourself, yourselves
Singular nouns ending in -s, sh, -ch, or -x form the plural by adding -es:
kiss, kisses church, churches
fish, fishes tax, taxes
All of these are fairly straightforward, where we are more likely to make mistakes is with words ending in -o If the o is preceded by a vowel, it is usually a case of just adding -s (radio, radios, zoo, zoos). But if the ois preceded by a consonant, the plural form is usually -es (hero, heroes; tomato, tomatoes). We could go on to elaborate more rules, but the fact is that, in the end, you simply have to know in most cases, and then check if you are unsure. This is probably where most students go wrong. It is the old saying about spoiling the ship for a ha’porth of tar. We often encounter essays where students have worked for days on what they have written, but then at the last moment have failed to spend half an hour going through and checking every aspect of the presentation and spelling. This is misguided: the marker cannot focus exclusively on your ideas, and a poorly spelt and poorly punctuated piece of work is bound to do less well than one with few errors.
There are cases where plural spellings seem to be controversial. Some people will accept only curricula as the plural of curriculum, while others will use curriculum’s. Then there are American spellings: Britain favors programmed for the listing of television shows, but uses program (the American spelling) for anything to do with computers. The verb form, though, is programmed. And there are words such as color, flavor and center, which are American English spellings that could confuse the unwary: British English has color, flavor and centre.