How Do I Become a Better Speller?

A college freshman asked me how to spell “valiant” and when I did, he wondered why it was not “-ent”. He asked how I knew that and I had no idea how to respond! All along, I’ve been a terrific speller, even winning some spelling bees in my younger years. But after some thoughtful consideration and reference to my classes on teaching English, I have come up with a few helpful tips:

1. The number one thing that bolsters your spelling ability is reading. The two are so inherently linked that it is almost impossible to be a good speller without being a good reader.

2. Exposing yourself to different types of text will increase your knowledge of the way things are spelled. Through reading newspapers, novels, blogs, even billboards, your brain memorizes spelling patterns.

3. Becoming familiar with root words will also help. We get confused with prefixes and suffixes sometimes and forget the word’s spelling. By singling out the root word, we take away half the problem!

4. Writing frequently also helps you to spell with more precision. You will quickly learn which words “look right” and if not, never hesitate to consult a dictionary. Once you’ve written a word correctly a few times, you will start to remember this.

5. Familiarize yourself with spelling rules. These include but are not limited to:

“i before e except after c”
“The letter y preceded by a consonant changes to i before a suffix”
“Most words drop the final silent e before a suffix beginning with a vowel”
“When adding a suffix to a word that ends with a single consonant after a single vowel and stressing the last syllable in the pronunciation of the word, the final consonant is doubled.”

Claire on August 30, 2007 Subscribe to our RSS Feed

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15 Responses to “How Do I Become a Better Speller?”

Daniel Leonard on August 30th, 2007 3:33 pm

A tip I’ve heard: if you want to remember how to spell a word, try to spell it alphabetically–that is, with its letters in alphabetical order. For example: poltergeist -> eeigloprstt. To do this, you have to know how to spell it properly, and it might help you to concentrate on visualizing the word in your mind. Spelling and writing words backwards might have the same effect.
Daniel on August 30th, 2007 5:33 pm

Yeah if I am not wrong Maeve wrote something similar on a comment.
kelly on August 30th, 2007 5:41 pm

I would skip reading blogs - too many misspellings. It really is amazing how many people cannot spell - or have atrocious typing skills or non-existent proofing.
Daniel on August 30th, 2007 5:55 pm

kelly, i think that the “blogs” generalization is too big.

There are some blogs around the net that attract more readers than mainstream websites (e.g., http://www.huffingtonpost.com/).

There must be something good in them .

Blogs are just a type of website, if they are good or not depends on who writes and manages them.
twoluvcats on August 30th, 2007 7:12 pm

I am an atrocious speller!! But the time savings in just pounding out my misspellings and then fixing them later is worth it to me…takes me too much time to have to think about how to spell a word correctly!

“The two are so inherently linked that it is almost impossible to be a good speller without being a good reader.”

…true, but it IS possible to be a good reader without being a good speller

Because I know I can’t spell, I use spellcheck, and proofreading…the best invention ever is FireFox’s inline textbox spell checker. Thank heaven that now even my comments are spell checked and I don’t make an ass of myself across the web. lol
Geoff Foster on August 30th, 2007 8:43 pm

Seeing your remark about prefixes and suffixes reminds me of a couple of rather amusing misapprehensions I have come across while editing.

One is to do with “indices”, an alternative spelling to “indexes” often found in scientific writing. I had a student who made a back-formation to “indice” as the singular.

And in another paper on a physiological subject, it became apparent that the writer thought that “mice” was the singular form, so talked about ” .. injecting this mice..”, then using “mices” as the plural.

[Shades of Tom and Jerry's "I hate meeces to pieces"!]
Egon on August 30th, 2007 8:50 pm

I’ve always been pretty good speller (also winning spelling bees back in my day) but my wife isn’t. She reads a lot, but mostly fiction novels, whereas I read a lot, but only non-fiction books, blogs, etc. I wonder if there’s a correlation between the types of reading we do, or if it’s something else? She often asks me how I knew how to spell certain word, and I never have any idea how I know, I just do.
Derrick on August 31st, 2007 1:02 am

I find it impossible to spell. I am a fairly avid reader, but it has never really helped my spelling. I think that it has something to do with my dominant auditory learning style. Visual learning advise is fairly limited. The advise to sound out the word phonetically seems the most helpful for my learning style.
kwx on August 31st, 2007 3:08 am

Thanks for the tips, do you mind putting up some examples for each of the rules mentioned at the end of the post?
Daniel on August 31st, 2007 9:38 am

We will cover each of the rules individually on future posts (some have been already covered, check the “Spelling” category).
harry on November 11th, 2007 1:53 pm

i all ways do mistakes in writing English give me some tips for that
Cheryl on January 31st, 2008 12:55 pm

Actually, I don’t think what you read has anything to do with how well you spell. I read primarily fiction, with a smattering of non-fiction, and can spell fairly well. My husband, who is also a reader of fiction, claims that spelling is for spell-checkers - and has never been good at spelling himself.
sara khatib on May 26th, 2008 4:25 pm

hi , good day I want to tell you that when you get exersises on spelling please can you send them to me because I suck in spelling and in my reportcards I want a good grade on spelling.
sincerly
Sara Khatib
Beveine on July 2nd, 2008 8:35 pm

If you want to become a better speller you must practise, I have not been a great speller myself but I am now reading more books and I have sign up with dictionary.com, so everyday I learn a new word and its meaning, pronouncation and how to spell it. I think you should sign up also. Thanks for reading have a great day.