Growing up in Canada, I had to contend with learning two different spellings and pronunciations for words like “schedule”, “colour”, “omelette”, “zed” vs “zee”, “-ise” vs “-ize”, and so on and so forth, so I had to come up with some little tricks to remember how to spell things. Sometimes I’d put on a mental Quebecois or English accent.
Other ones like diarrhea was “Die-err-HEE-uh”, and now that I’m in Australia, it’s most definitely “Die-err-HOE-uh”. 😂
I also recite the ABCs more often than I should. I know a lot of you do, too.
What are some ways that you thought of to help you remember how to spell things? Any language counts.
When trying to remember how to spell Oracle I always have to recite
One
Rich
Asshole
Called
Larry
EllisonYou would think working in IT for over 20 years I would remember how to spell one of the worst databases ever.
When I was a kid, i was taught “Oh U Lonely Duck”, for Would, Could, Should.
This is really good! I’m keeping this for when I have nieces and nephews to teach.
If you’re a good typist there’s a trick:
Picture a keyboard, then a pair of hands coming up to the home row. Then imagine the hands typing the word.
“Muscle memory” and how humans use written language means we 100% can type a word (spelled correctly) but not consciously remember the exact order of the letters. To our conscious brains, the exact order just isn’t really important. But typing is like riding a bike, if you’re good at you’re not consciously typing every letter.
Like, when riding a bike you think “turn left” and your body pulls off a bunch of complicated movements and sleight adjustments. Think “type antidisestablishmentarianism” and your fingys do the spelling.
What’s really useful with that trick, is using it to remember passwords and other “nonsense” strings. Just imagine yourself typing it over and over until you trick your unconscious mind into memorizing the sequence.
This is legitimately how I think out words, I learned how to spell by typing
Separate has A Rat in it.
If anyone has a good trick for occasion and occurrence, I’m all ears. They’re worse than USB-A ports for me.
Hmm… Might be a roundabout way, but occurrence could be that good things occur in threes… So 3 C’s. I don’t know what to do about the double R’s though.
Connect-I-cut
Oh, good one. I forgot that I used to say this as a kid!
Field and shield
EVERYTIME
I can’t spell anything without a dictionary or, these days a spell check. I usually know where the vowels go, so I cycle through them until the word “looks” right, or the red squiggle goes away.
I don’t like grammerly bc I know how to write, it’s just the spelling that vexes me.
For medication names, I’ll pronounce every vowel like the letter name, so A is “eigh”, E is “ee”, I is “eye”, O is “Oh”, U is “you” and Y is “why”.
So Ibuprofen is “eye-byoo-proh-feen”
Interesting! I have heard almost similar with eye-byoo-proh-fen instead. Wonder if it’s a regional thing or an individual thing.
Not something I have trouble with spelling, but a common typo I noticed I make is spelling “check” with a ‘h’ instead of the ‘k’ for some reason.
I’ve found myself working on a tricky civil engineering project in Scotland, and Every Single Time I write ”peat” I type it P-E-A-T-H-backspace.
