Page 569 - Word Power Made Easy: The Complete Handbook for Building a Superior Vocabulary

6. ex__________________

7. pre__________________
8. proc__________________dure
9. station__________________ry (paper)

10. station__________________ry (still)
11. sep__________________rate
12. compar__________________tive

13. re__________________o__________________end
14. ecsta__________________y
15. anal__________________e

16. paral__________________e
17. rep__________________tition

18. irrit__________________ble
19. inimit__________________ble
20. ab__________________ence
21. superintend__________________nt

22. con__________________nce
23. a__________________oint

24. r__________________diculous
25. d__________________spair

Mere repetitious drill is of no value in learning to spell a word correctly. You’ve probably
heard the one about the youngster who was kept after school because he was in the habit
of using the ungrammatical expression “I have went.” Miss X was going to cure her pupil,
even if it required drastic measures. So she ordered him to write “I have gone” one
thousand times. “Just leave your work on my desk before you go home,” she said, “and I’ll

nd it when I come in tomorrow morning.” Well, there were twenty pages of neat script on
her desk next morning, one thousand lines of “I have gone’s,” and on the last sheet was a
note from the child. “Dear Teacher,” it read, “I have done the work and I have went home.”
If this didn’t actually happen, it logically could have, for in any drill, if the mind is not
actively engaged, no learning will result. If you drive a car, or sew, or do any familiar and
repetitious manual work, you know how your hands can carry on an accustomed task while

your mind is far away. And if you hope to learn to spell by lling pages with a word, stop
wasting your time. All you’ll get for your trouble is writer’s cramp.
The only way to learn to spell those words that now plague you is to devise a mnemonic for
each one.
If you are never quite sure whether it’s indispensible or indispensable, you can spell it out
one hundred, one thousand, or one million times—and the next time you have occasion to
write it in a sentence, you’ll still wonder whether to end it with -ible or -able. But if you say

to yourself just once that able people are generally indispensable, that thought will come to
you whenever you need to spell the word; in a few seconds you’ve conquered another
spelling demon. By engineering your own mnemonic through a study of the architecture of
a troublesome word, you will become so quickly and completely involved with the correct