People are forever apologizing on Twitter for spelling mistakes, but to be honest, being a former primary school teacher I can read just about anything. I also have a knack for reading upside down.
Funnily though, I used to be a very good speller until I started teaching, now I look at everything twice. Sometimes the way children spell is incredibly logical. For example, ‘fone’ it makes perfect sense and does apply the rules of phonics and I’m not surprised children find it difficult to spell ‘phone’. However, I do want them to learn to spell correctly and I hate seeing text speak anywhere but on a mobile, msn or twitter.
Over the years I’ve developed a few quirky ways of helping me to spell……
Island – ‘is land surrounded by water’
Tomatoes – ‘I squished the tomato with my toes’
Broccoli – ‘Two lion cubs and one lioness’ (two c’s and one l). This one is courtesy of the zany @iaingilmour
Stationery – I think of the ‘e’ in envelope
And of course the good old ‘i before e except after c’. So, you could imagine my surprise when Stephen Fry, the all-round English genius, reported on QI that is not the case and that there are over 900 instances when this rule doesn’t apply (e.g. Weird, ancient, glacier, policies, society, science). Now I’m scuppered!
Can you think of any others?
Do you have any tricks for remembering spellings?
Does anyone have a Mnemonic for the word Mnemonic?
How many spelling mistakes did you find in this post?