Better spelling
Clever man that I am, I said the other day that you should take care not to rely too heavily on tools like spelling checkers, because they can lead you astray; that you had to develop the skills to know how to spell correctly yourself.
Then someone asked me what one should do if they wished to learn to spell better, and I went "Ummm…" I hadn’t given that part of it much thought yet. (In many ways, I’m rather like Indiana Jones—not in the ruggedly handsome, heroic way, but in the "I’m making it up as I go" way.
So I did a bit of googling and found some resources for learning to spell better. One of the best ideas was to spend some time figuring out what sort of spelling mistakes you make most often. For example, do you reverse letters as you type? It may just be that your brain is getting ahead of your fingers, and you just need to be a bit more careful as you type. Maybe you’re using one of the so-called "rules" of spelling when you shouldn’t, like thinking about "I before E except after C" and writing nieghbor instead of neighbor. Or you might be mixing up a few homophones, that is, words that sound alike but aren’t spelled the same, like there, their, and they’re.
Get yourself a dictionary and keep it handy. When you’re unsure about a word, don’t just guess, look it up. Yeah, it’s probably easier to ask your spouse the crossword puzzle fanatic, or your roommate the English major (although I wouldn’t rely on that; one year my wife roomed with an English major who couldn’t spell to save her life), but you won’t get any better at spelling.
Learning a few basic spelling rules is fine, but remember this (from one of the sites liked below): "English spelling ‘rules’ are bunk. No matter what rule you come up with there are always exceptions."
All that said, here are a few of the things I found that could be useful:
That’ll keep you busy for a spell.
Roy Jacobsen
in Good advice from here and there, Elsewhere on the Web, Writer's toolbox
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