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on-misspelling.html
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<h2>On Misspelling</h2>
<h3>Why I do it and perhaps how I can improve</h3>
<label>22 July, 2020</label>
<p>English is notoriously hard to spell. It is perhaps one of the biggest hurdles that people learning English have to go through, after learning how to make English sounds. Yet language learners and native speakers can both share in the frustration of its spelling system.</p>
<p>One would think that the speakers of such a hard language to write would be forgiving when people misspell words. I believe that most people are in day-to-day communication. Yet in situations that matter in people's lives, such as getting a job or doing a sales pitch, having a misspelling can bring judgement, contempt, and rejection to the unfortunate author.</p>
<p>Like drivers, people think they are better at it than most people. Just like drivers, most people are worse than they think. Personally I have gone through periods where I believe I was an excellent speller. Then I lived through periods where I was an embarrassingly bad speller. I have fluctuated between okay and bad ever since. My lifetime spelling achievement puts me in the mediocre category.</p>
<p>But why? If I were consistently good, I would attribute it, like most people who are consistently good at spelling, to my superior mind and education. If I were consistently bad, I would attribute that to a poor education, or a learning disability, and secretly I would suffer thinking that I had an inferior mind.</p>
<p>But my spelling power fluctuates. Spelling inconsistently feeds my vanity and my anxieties. But why? Why? I have come up with the following guesses on why my spelling is mediocre and why it varies.</p>
<p>My misspellings go up when I am tired. For a number of years, I had bad sleep, so my spelling got worse. My sentences also become strange. In the last few years I have used frequent misspelling as a personal alert for me to go to sleep.</p>
<p>Another trait that I have is that I seem to be a strong mimic. I will see and copy what I am exposed to. So during my college years I was exposed to a lot of professionally proofread writing, so my spelling was excellent. When I taught middle school for a year and I was exposed to kids still learning how to spell, my spelling became horrible. If I am reading in Spanish, then some Spanish spelling begins to creep in English. If I am learning another language, let's say Latin, then I adopt Latin spelling. It is not like English is the only language affected. I recently noticed that I was writing English-inspired Spanish.</p>
<p>One solution for this mimicry side effect is that I can stop reading in other languages. Yet I enjoy that so much I am not going to stop. I need to learn how to live with it.</p>
<p>I also attribute a lot of misspelling to my writing haze, this mental state where I am in a frenzy to write down thoughts. While in this state, I don't see misspellings or grammatical mistakes.</p>
<p>Yesterday I thought about another possible reason. Maybe it is a bad habit. Perhaps internet communication, with its short, meaningless exchanges, has encouraged me to be sloppy. I don't care because the bulk of what I write online doesn't matter.</p>
<p>I am guessing that all the above contribute to poor misspelling. Now I am trying to figure out how to improve my spelling.</p>
<p>One of the key features of English spelling is that you more or less have to memorize how a word is written. The task ahead of us is one of memorization, so mnemonic tactics should be use. To better learn the spelling of words, we need to guess its origin, since English has different spelling and pronunciation rules for words that come from different languages.</p>
<p>I am planning on making a list of words I have misspelled so that I can practice those. I will probably use Anki to practice. I have been having a problem with how exactly make cards for it, since I would see the correct answer as the solution. Or I could write the misspelling of a word and then correct it. But then I would be exposing myself to misspellings, and my mimicry trait could learn the misspellings instead. I could also write the pronunciation transcript. Maybe it is best if I make recordings of the word and then I have to write it out.</p>
<p>There are probably spelling bee quiz programs that I can use to test myself every so often.</p>
<p>I will try it out and report how my efforts went.</p>
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