Even without memorizing the rules, you can improve your spelling simply by reviewing them and scanning the examples and exceptions until the fundamental concepts begin to sink in. I adapted the six basic spelling rules that appear below from that dictionary. I have a crusty old copy of a book called Instant Spelling Dictionary, now in its third edition but first published in 1964, that I still use frequently.
Always proofread a hard copy, with your own two eyes. There is an instructive moment in a M*A*S*H episode, when Father Mulcahy complains to Colonel Potter about a typo in a new set of Bibles-one of the commandments reads "thou shalt commit adultery." Father sheepishly worries aloud that "These lads are taught to follow orders." For want of a single word the intended meaning is lost. They are not gods, and they do not substitute for meticulous proofreading and clear thinking. So proceed with caution when using spell checkers. The student’s spell checker did not pick up the error, but the professor certainly did, and he told me that he even speculated privately that the student who wrote the paper did so while on mescaline. I once received a complaint from an outraged professor that a student had continually misspelled "miscellaneous" as "mescaline" (a hallucinogenic drug). Just as so many of us rely on calculators to do all our math for us-even to the point that we do not trust calculations done by our own hand-far too many of us use spell checkers as proofreaders, and we ultimately use them to justify our own laziness. To understand the limited power of the spell checker, enjoy the following poem, whose origins are unknown.
0 kommentar(er)
