Page 39 - Perfect English Grammar: The Indispensable Guide to Excellent Writing and Speaking

Spelling is how we put characters and letters in their generally accepted order to
represent words.

Unfortunately, English spelling is a mess!

A lot of our most basic words are spelled in a way that made more sense
centuries ago when English sounded differently. These days, though, the match
between orthography (a fancy way of saying spelling) and pronunciation (the

sounds we make with our mouths when we say a word) is sometimes lost.

The problem becomes worse because, in English, the written language has
never been a perfect representation of the spoken language, which has many

dialects that are difficult to accommodate. Even when they sometimes match, the
spoken language changes relatively quickly and the written word changes

relatively slowly. That match disappears over centuries as the spoken and written
forms go increasingly out of sync.

4.1 Improve Your Spelling

Want to improve your spelling? Rather than doing drills or flash cards, read
really interesting stuff just a little bit above your skill level.

For example, if you like science, instead of reading about new scientific
developments in a daily newspaper, read about them in New Scientist, which is a

magazine written at a higher reading level than most newspapers.

Or, if you usually read books about time-traveling cats written for young
adults, try reading books about time-traveling cats written for adults. You will

likely encounter more complicated, harder-to-spell words.
After a certain amount of time of repeatedly seeing those same hard words,

they will start to seem easy and normal.

If you want to learn to spell a lot of words very fast, try this trick: Write them
all into the craziest story you can imagine. Then read the story aloud to yourself

and friends—but when you get to the words you need to learn, spell them out
■instead of saying them: Then Kazoo the Time-Traveling Wonder Cat s-u-

b-j-u-g-a-t-e-d the poor Puppy Planet.