Double consonants or single consonants?
We are continuing here with problems in the body of a word. How, for example, does one spell a word like embarrass? How does one know, if at ell, that there are two ‘r’s in it? The fact is that there is no simple way of inferring what is correct. There comes a point at which you have to know these things or run a spell-check (or risk getting it wrong). Time and time again; there is no clear way of knowing whether we require a double or a single letter for a consonantal sound. we are going to provide a list of the words that are spelt wrongly not just in students’ essay but in a whole range of formal documents: words like accommodate end appall, committee and exaggerate, skilful and unparalleled.
But there is one rule for the endings of words, even if it is not instantly memorable. Consequently, we have begin and beginning, stop and stopping, but in unparalleled above, the emphasis wasn’t on the last syllable in the word unparallel. What about adding to sleep? It’s sleeping, because the consonant p isn’t preceded by a single vowel. We are aware that the rule here is probably more difficult to grasp than remembering the spelling of words – and in a sense that is where we are directing you. The rules, such as they are, are so extensive that it is a much easier answer to start thinking about your spelling: look harder at how words are spelt, and how you spell words. We’ll turn to how some other words end in a moment, put first, while we are on the ‘body’ of words, we should add something about the use of capital letters and hyphens.
Capital letters
This might not seem to be a spelling issue, but in a certain way it is – and getting it wrong can be irritating for the reader. Capital letters exist for proper names: Marie, Oliver, Roberts, Hughes, London, Paris, and London, Palladium. Royal Opera House, Sydney Harbor Bridge, The Dog and Duck, curios. For some reason, people use capitals far too often. You don’t need them for centuries: it is in the twentieth century, not In the Twentieth Century. The best rule is simply to ask yourself, if in doubt, why you are using the capital letter. The trend is to use them less and less. Today, therefore, most people would write:
The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, had lunch with the president, George W. Bush.
The main reason given for the use of fewer capital letters is that too many in a piece of writing interrupt the passage of the eye along a line. You would write government, the cabinet, but Department of Education (though this can be avoided by turning it around and making it the education department). So, the English school at the university would be correct, as would Brighton’s football club. You would write the north of England and the south of France, but East Timor, if in doubt, underplay rather than overplay capitals. Note, however, that you would write President Bush, not president Bush; the reason why is that President Bush is, in a sense, his name, or a substitute for his name. In the same way, we would write about Queen Elizabeth, but then discuss how Elizabeth, in her role as queen, has served her country well.
It might be objected that in this example our advice has veered away from the ‘rules’ and ‘correctness’ towards usage and the changing language. The inconsistency, however, is only apparent: there are ‘rules’ but they are changing at different rates. What seems to make the changes acceptable is the extent to which they are taken up by educated users of English, in that sense the ‘rules’ remain in place, but modified.