SPELLING

Of the mechanical errors that occur in writing English, misspelling accounts for more than half. Do not, therefore, hurl your cookies because you’ve found a section here on spelling. If you have spelling problems, read these pages.

Remember that the spelling-check device on your computer won’t help you if the misspelled word you write happens to be a correct word, as in then/than, principal/principle, and effect/affect.

English spelling is a bit of a mess, mostly because the language wasn’t designed by anybody but instead just sort of haphazardly accumulated its words and sounds from many places and over many centuries. The resulting anomalies are so numerous that no simple rules can begin to take them all into account.

What does make ...

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