Tips for making writing easier; part 9: improving your spelling.

You can build a simple learning system that will take you beyond the spell checker and save you from embarrassment.

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In this age of the electronic spell checker, spelling skills may seem largely dispensable to many writers--until they step up to a flip chart and brutally damage their reputations. Even with the spell check turned on, the sense of security is of course illusory, since there are many mistakes it simply cannot catch. So, in the final part of this series, let's look at some easy ways to improve your spelling.

HOW GOOD ARE YOU WITH TOUGH WORDS?

Here are 18 tough words--some spelled correctly, some misspelled. Decide how you would spell them, then look them up in a dictionary. If you get more than three wrong, you probably should put yourself on a leisurely improvement program.

abscense          embarrass         questionnaire
aquainted         equiped           seperate
assistant         excede            seize
attendence        occured           simplefied
catagory          precede           supercede
commitee          procede           yield

TAKING LESSONS FROM YOUR SPELL CHECKER

If you decide you need help, turn your spell checker into your tutor. Create a folder called "Spelling Lessons" on your computer, then occasionally copy the correct spelling of words you have misspelled to a file in that folder. The more you do this, the more the proper spellings will become imprinted on your mind.

BECOMING SMARTER THAN YOUR SPELL CHECKER

So far, spell checkers can't save you from confusing similar words. For many writers, this is the hardest part of spelling.

First, find out if this is a real problem area for you. Here are a few common word pairs. Do you know what each word means? Check your answers against the dictionary.

adapt, adopt             except, accept
advice, advise           forward, foreword
affect, effect           holy, wholly
aid, aide                it's, its
all ready, already       loose, lose
appraise, apprise        moral, morale
assure, ensure           moot, mute
capital, capitol         personal, personnel
choose, chose            principal, principle
complement, compliment   quiet, quite
council, counsel         stationary, stationery
device, devise           their, there
discreet, discrete       to, too, two
elicit, illicit          weather, whether
ensure, insure           your, you're

If you were wrong more than three times, consider making a special effort to avoid these potentially confusing errors. To help you get started, we'll be glad to e-mail you a much longer list of commonly confused words that you can study and narrow down to your "personal list." More generally, learn to become a little suspicious of the meaning of your words. For instance, when you write "all together," or any other words of whose spelling you are not 100% confident, is that really what you mean? Looking it up in the dictionary, you may just find that you meant "altogether"--and your personal list of troublesome word pairs has just grown by another one!

Cheryl and Peter Reimold have been teaching communication skills to engineers, scientists, and businesspeople for 20 years. Their firm, PERC Communications (telephone [phone], e-mail [e-mail]), offers businesses consulting and writing services, as well as customized in-house courses on writing, presentation skills, and on-the-job communication skills. Visit their web site at www.allaboutcommunication.com.