15/06/2024
Do you want to improve your spelling?
This book offers a gateway to spelling success. It details common causes of spelling errors and suggests effective strategies to ensure correct spelling for secondary school students and adults. It is ideal for anyone teaching others or wishing to improve their own spelling.
Simply reading the book will improve spelling, as repeated exposure to correctly spelt words helps to embed spelling patterns in the brain.
The top 100 most used words are introduced with explanations of their spelling patterns. This provides an ideal starting point. The top most misspelt words are also presented for readers to practise. Regularly used words such as, ‘February’, ‘forty’, ‘separate’, ‘their’ and ‘definitely’ which are often misspelt, are presented alongside suggestions for ways to remember the correct spellings.
There is a comprehensive guide which serves to underpin all that is required for good spelling. It explains how language sounds map to their alphabetic representations and how understanding common prefixes and suffixes can help to improve both vocabulary and spelling. It also includes explanations on how to form plurals, when to double consonants, when to use apostrophes, when to use ‘a’ or ‘an’ and how to correctly form contractions. Words with foreign origins, commonly misspelt food items and medical terms are also covered. There is an extensive section on word endings and a section on some less commonly used graphemes and idiosyncrasies in spelling.
Homophones (words with the same sound but different spellings and meanings) account for a high number of misspellings. Learning homophones together is a possible cause for the confusion. To overcome this problem, there are separate lists of homophones for readers to learn. There is also a dictionary of over 800 commonly misspelt words to work through.
