How to Improve Your Spelling

How to Spell Better

You’ve had this problem forever. Somehow, in your elementary schooling years, you never mastered spelling. Maybe you had poor teachers; maybe you were taught phonics when your learning style was visual sight memorization. Maybe the opposite was true. Maybe you have had, all of your life, a brain dysfunction which does not allow you to hear or see words correctly. Whatever the reason, you are now a college student or an adult, and you are ready to learn how to improve your spelling. What you may need to do, actually, is accept the fact that you may never be a good speller and to use technology that is now available to compensate for the spelling skills that you have never been able to master. If, on the other hand you are determined to improve your spelling skills, there are steps that you can take in that direction as well. Here are solutions for both goals.

Learning How To Spell Well On Your Own

How do you feel about returning to 2^nd grade? Are you motivated enough to go back in time to where things feel apart in the area of spelling and to address this gap in your learning? Technology can help you, if you are motivated.

There are a large number of sites and apps that reinforce spelling concepts and skills. Some are clearly designed for young children but there are others that for ESL students and adults who are learning the language. Part of how to improve spelling can be addressed by learning the rules that these ESL individuals must also learn. For example, one important rule is “’i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’ or when pronounced like a long ‘a’ as in ‘weigh.’” So, according to this rule, the word believe has “ie,” the word “deceive” has “ei” and the word “sleigh” has “ei.” There are many rules like this, and these, if really memorized, should help you with your spelling issues. There are also exceptions to every spelling rules, and these will just have to be memorized. This approach to learning how to spell better will take time, but if you are committed, you can be quite successful.

Using Technology to Spell For You

By far, the vast majority of poor spelling students and adults now rely on technology for their spelling rather than traditional methods. Thus, if you really do not have the time to follow a traditional path in how to improve your spelling, you can use any number of software apps and tools to scan your writing and correct you mis-spelling automatically. Certainly Microsoft Word does an adequate job but it is not foolproof, so when spelling is an absolutely critical element of what you write, you will need a more sophisticated tool to scan everything you write and correct your errors.

Some people are just poor spellers. It is not a comment on intelligence – it is just a factor of incorrect early education or sometimes a slight learning disability that is the cause. Whatever the cause, you have these two options and should take the one that works best for your needs.