100 ways to improve your writing - Gary Provost 2019

Improve your spelling
Nine ways to improve your writing when you’re not writing

There aren’t many firm rules that apply to the spelling of English words. Mostly, good spelling is a matter of forming the right mental associations and developing an eye for words that look a little weird.

In the dictionary, look up any word that you’re not sure of. If you have been misspelling it, write it correctly ten times. Invent a visual image for the correct spelling. For example: The Sahara desert only has one s, like Sahara, but the dessert after a meal has a second s, like a second helping.

How will better spelling improve your writing? Well, for one thing, you won’t write desert when you mean dessert. More important, it will improve your writing by reducing the number of times you annoy the reader. A few misspelled words will jar the reader’s concentration, and a lot of misspelled words will wreck your credibility. Right or wrong, the reader will perceive you as . . . well, stupid, to put it bluntly. If you don’t have the respect of the reader, your writing will not work.

Spell check is available in most word processing programs; however, it does have its limitations. So although it catches many mistakes that are ungrammatical, spell check is imperfect, missing some mistakes and marking others as incorrect when they are not. If you spell a word correctly, spell check will sometimes let it go, even if the usage is incorrect. Examples are principle vs. principal, there vs. their vs. they’re, and dear vs. deer. You need to know how the word should be spelled so you can check the spell checker.

Fifty of the Most Commonly Misspelled Words

acceptable

acknowledgment

apology

appetite

architect

assassinate

autumn

calendar

changeable

conscience

conscious

correspondence

criticism

deceive

discernible

embarrass

eminent

existence

fascinate

grateful

hygiene

imaginable

immediately

irrelevant

jewelry

judgment

lovable

miscellaneous

mischievous

mortgage

necessarily

occasionally

occurrence

omission

orchestra

potatoes

professor

pseudonym

religious

rhythmic

scissors

syllable

tragedy

umbrella

vanilla

vengeance

weird

wholesome

youthful

zealot