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Tag Archives: Spell Check

Treasure Hunt #1

21 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by Nancy Clark in Grammar Tips, Uncategorized

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English grammar, homophones, pronouns, proofreading, sound-alikes, Spell Check, spelling, troublesome words

HomophonesAs promised last week, I’m posting the first of several proofreading exercises to give you practice in finding your own errors. We’ll start off with one that focuses on only one kind of error: words that are pronounced the same (or nearly the same) but are spelled differently and have different uses. Our English spelling system contains a number of these word pairs (or triplets). They are often a stumbling block for writers and are hard to pick out when proofreading because Spell Check doesn’t flag them. Examples include your/you’re, whose/who’s, though/through, to/too/two, and than/then.

So here’s a short essay for you to proofread for only that kind of error. The challenge is to find the 15 words that are used incorrectly and replace them with the correct words. Take as much time as you want. Accuracy is more important than speed! I’ll be posting the answers next week so you can see how well you did. Now put on those reading glasses or grab that magnifying glass and begin your search!

The Cemetery

Your not going to believe this, but I was once offered the position of manager of a cemetery. The Charles Baber Cemetery in Pottsville, PA was willed to Trinity Episcopal church by Charles  Baber, a member who had established the cemetery many years before. I didn’t no weather to accept the job or not. It was not quite what I was used to, but then it was the only offer I had, so I took it.

The first week on the job I took a tour though the cemetery and the beautiful chapel that had been built opposite the entrance. The cemetery was located on rolling hills just off the center of town and reminded me of  a quite park. There were many different varieties of trees and the remains of a pond were children used to ice skate in the winter. An old barn originally housed the funeral carriage and it’s team of white horses that pulled it in funeral processions passed rows of silent spectators.

In the office of the church, I found several very large books that contained the burial records for the cemetery. The entries dated back to the 1800s and every entry was handwritten. I had too handle the books with great care because some of there bindings were lose. It was also hard to tell sometimes who’s body was in which plot because the plot numbers in the book didn’t always correspond to the map of the cemetery.

Even through the job lasted only a year, I was more then satisfied with what I learned about the history of the cemetery and the people buried there. Its not every day that a job opens up to manage a place that people are dying to get into!

***

Feel free to share this exercise with friends or use it in your classroom. It’s an original essay I wrote a number of years ago and describes a real job I had. Students in my developmental writing classes struggled with it, but those who spent the most time found the most errors. Persistence pays off!

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Spelling Tip #3: Space or No Space?

15 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by Nancy Clark in Grammar Tips, Uncategorized

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common spelling errors, Spell Check, spelling, spelling tip, two words or one

DictionaryBelieve it or not, a space between two words can make a huge difference! No, I’m not talking about life and death issues, but deciding whether or not to use a space can make a real difference in the meaning of what you are trying to communicate.

Here is one real-life example of what I mean: A) The boys were playing along while in the snow.  B) The boys were playing a long while in the snow.

In this case, the meaning of the first sentence is that the boys were going along with whatever was happening and the activity happened to be in the snow. The meaning of the second sentence is that the boys were out playing in the snow for a considerable time. Just one little space –a blank –can change the meaning of a sentence!

In other cases of space or no space, you must choose the right one for the right situation. Here are some more real-life examples:

A) The suspect went into his house at 11 p.m.  B) The suspect went in to find his gun.

A) Sometime last night, the gas station was robbed.  B) That station had been targeted for quite some time.

A) There is always someone willing to help.  B) All ways to solve the problem will be accepted.

Then there are those words that are simply spelled wrong quite frequently. One that makes me see red is the misspelling of “nowadays” as “now days,” and that just doesn’t work! One that I have more tolerance for is “a lot” spelled as one word, “alot.” It is a common error, but still considered an error. Even auto-correct will catch that one.

A similar error is spelling “all right” as “alright.” But in this case, the one-word spelling remains in common and acceptable use. Figure that one out! The explanation in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary (www.merriam-webster.com) may shed a little light: “The one-word spelling alright appeared some 75 years after all right itself had reappeared from a 400-year-long absence. Since the early 20th century some critics have insisted alright is wrong, but it has its defenders and its users. It is less frequent than all right but remains in common use especially in journalistic and business publications. It is quite common in fictional dialogue, and is used occasionally in other writing.”

So there you have it! Those little spaces between some words are important. Be sure to pay attention to them when you proofread.

If you’d like to share similar examples, feel free to post them in a comment!

 

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Helpful Spelling Tip #1

11 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by Nancy Clark in Grammar Tips

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

choose or chose, English spelling, loose or lose, Spell Check, spelling, spelling tip

Spelling

There are many reasons why our English spelling system is confusing. With the advent of the printing press back in 1440, spelling became much more uniform. Dictionaries emerged to further solidify the correct spelling of words. Then over time, pronunciations of some words shifted, but the spelling remained the same. Our habit of borrowing words from other languages and then changing them – or not – to fit our spelling and pronunciation systems has made the whole affair even messier. So we are stuck in the mire of our own making, and the only solution is to don waders and muck our way through.

Spell Check isn’t smart enough to catch these vagaries, so one way to remember some of the inconsistencies is to group words with similar spellings and/or pronunciations and just outright memorize them.

Here is Helpful Spelling Tip #1 to get you started.

Many people confuse the words loose and lose, and for good reason. The word loose is spelled like the word choose, so the temptation is to use loose as you would use choose, as in I don’t want to loose my iPad.

Unfortunately, even though the spellings are similar, in this case the pronunciations are different. In choose, the -s sounds like -z; in loose, the -s sounds like -s. So the above sentence should read I don’t want to lose my iPad.

One way to remember this pronunciation difference is to pair loose with goose, and pair lose with booze. That might result in a nonsense sentence like The loose goose will lose its booze.

Or if you’re more comfortable memorizing the three verb forms, you could start muttering in your sleep every night: choose, chose, chosen and lose, lost, lost.

Other than these tips, I’m afraid I’ve exhausted my imagination. If you have found other ways to keep loose and lose/choose and chose straight in your mind, please feel free to share.

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