Top Five Spelling Tips and Tricks Posts
Over the last couple of years we’ve shared plenty of tips and tricks to help make spelling and grammar easier. For those of you who are new to our site, here are five of our favourite posts from the archives:
- Five Tips for Teaching Spelling
Our Five Tips for Teaching Spelling post is useful for teachers, but students and independent learners might find it well worth a read too. Remember that if you find spelling difficult, you are not alone! Connect with us using #Spellzone2015 to share your struggles and achievements.
Other related posts you might be interested in are Five Reasons Why English Spelling is so Difficult and Five Reasons Why It’s Worth Learning to Spell.
- Ten Common Mistakes
English spelling and grammar is messy, inconsistent, and hard to get your head around. In this post, we quickly look at ten common mistakes and how to correct them. Don’t know when to use ‘e.g.’ and when to use ‘i.e.’? Baffled by ‘imply’ and ‘infer’? This post is for you.
- The Dirty Thirty
Here at Spellzone we love mnemonics (click here if you’re not sure what a mnemonic is). The Dirty Thirty are a list of words that people often spell wrong, which means examiners are usually watching out for them when marking papers. In this two-part post we look at the words and come up with mnemonics to help you remember how to spell each one. Click here for part one, and here for part two.
We also come up with mnemonics to help you remember how to spell another ten tricky words here.
- Lie vs. Lay
In one of our regular features, Commonly Confused Words, we look at two or more words that people often mix up. Sometimes these words sound exactly the same but have different spellings and meanings.
While ‘lie’ and ‘lay’ don’t sound the same, they are two words that even confident English speakers often have to check before using. To help, we’ve put together this handy flowchart so that you always know when to use each word:
Read more here.
Other pairs and groups of words we looked at include: accept vs. except, lose vs. loose, bought vs. brought, break vs. brake, to vs. too vs. two, desert vs. dessert, allowed vs. aloud, less vs. fewer, uninterested vs. disinterested, bear vs. bare, device vs. devise, are vs. our vs. hour, weather vs. whether vs. wether, passed vs. past,cite vs. site vs. sight, and a vs. an. We also looked at three commonly confused in- words.
- Twenty Often-Mispronounced Words
This post isn’t just for second-language speakers! Do you pronounce the ‘t’ in ‘often’? Or catch yourself saying ‘expresso’ instead of ‘espresso’? You might find our post on often-mispronounced words interesting. Click here to read more.
As a Yorkshire-based company, we feel it is important to point out that within English there are many different ways of pronouncing the same word, but if you’re new to the language, this post should serve as a useful starting point.
Are there any aspects of the English language that you just can’t get your head around? Let us know and we’ll blog about them.
Have a good week!
24 Feb 2015
blog home
