Page 40 - Perfect English Grammar: The Indispensable Guide to Excellent Writing and Speaking
P. 40
You’ll discover when you’re done that each word will be attached in your mind
to a particular part of your strange story; those kinds of memory clues, or
mnemonics, work because humans are much better at remembering stories than
lists of facts.
When you look up words in the glossary (see here) or in a dictionary, keep
them in a list. Chances are, you’re going to have to look them up again later:
sometimes it takes as many as six look-ups for a newly learned spelling to stick.
Your own personal World’s Worst Words list will become like a mini-dictionary
made just for you.
4.2 Common Spelling Errors
Spelling in English is a problem even for native speakers—even highly educated
native speakers. Studies show that good spelling isn’t necessarily a sign of
intelligence; instead, spelling well has a lot more to do with repetition and
practice, and can be learned even by people of ordinary intelligence.
One reason English’s spelling can be hard to master is the tangled
etymological history I mentioned before, where language traditions survive and
die in a hodgepodge fashion, leaving behind a patchwork of inconsistencies and
weirdness. Old spellings persist even though old pronunciations do not.
Another reason spelling is hard for some folks is that if you are an avid
reader—and I hope you are, as it is a great way to improve your language—you
will pick up the peculiarities and habits of those authors. Even if you did, at one
point, spell a word in what is considered correct for your place and time, you
might pick up a spelling that is more appropriate for some other place and time.
For example, in high school I read a great deal of Charles Dickens. I picked
up the spelling divers, which is now considered an archaism for diverse. It took
only one red mark on a school essay to drop that spelling very quickly!
4.2.1 BRITISH SPELLING VERSUS AMERICAN SPELLING
The differences between British and American spellings can be complicated, but
