Vocabulary & Spelling Success in 20 Minutes a Day

The book details:

• Title: Vocabulary & Spelling Success in 20 Minutes a Day, 4th Edition.
• Author(s): LearningExpress Editors.
• Publisher: LearningExpress.
• Language: American English.
•  Size: 1.30 Mb.
• Format: PDF.
• Date: 2006.
• Pages: 272.

A good vocabulary is essential to succeeding on tests, in class, or on the job. This self-paced tutorial consists of 20 lessons and numerous practice exercises created specifically to give readers a thorough grounding in every facet of a strong vocabulary, including pronunciation, spelling, context, definitions, word parts, denotation and connotation, synonyms, and antonyms. The book begins with a pretest to diagnose students' word knowledge and ends with a posttest that shows how much they've learned. A bonus appendix provides valuable study tips to help improve retention of new words.

Spell Well: Boost Your Word Power and Your Confidence

The book details:

• Title: Spell Well: Boost Your Word Power and Your Confidence.
• Author(s): Marion Field.
• Publisher: HowToBooks.
• Language: British English.
• Size: 4.70 Mb.
• Format: PDF.
• Date: Feb 15, 2005 (2nd Edition) .
• Pages: 145.

 It is true. A well-written letter is taken far more seriously than one using misspelt words. Research shows that people automatically assume you're more intelligent, and they'll take notice of you in a way they never did before. Now, with the help of this book you can discover the power of words for yourself. There are checklists and steps that ensure you'll soon be writing with much greater confidence.

About the Author

How to Master English Regular and Irregular Words!

In this post, I’m going to cast the light a little bit about the mastery of irregular words in English. Here, then, we have the real reason for a long study of principles, analogies, and classifications.  They help us to remember. If I come to the word _colonnade_ in reading, I observe at once that the double _n_ is an irregularity.  It catches my eye immediately.

"Ah!" I reflect almost in the fraction of a second as I read in continuous flow, "here is another of those exceptions."  Building on what I already know perfectly well, I master this word with the very slightest effort.  If we can build up a system which will serve the memory by way of association, so that the slight effort that can be given in ordinary reading will serve to fix a word more or less fully, we can soon acquire a marvelous power in the accurate spelling of words.

Again: In a spelling-book before me I see lists of words ending in (se, ize) and (se) all mixed together with no distinction.  The arrangement suggests memorizing every word in the language ending with either of these terminations, and until we have memorized any particular word we have no means of knowing what the termination is. 

2 Ways to Improve Your English Spelling Skills!

There are a lot of ways to help you learn and improve your English spelling skills. In this post, I'm going to cast the light about tow of them, and I hop to help you learn and master English spelling skills.

1.  Train the Ear.  Until the habit of observing articulate sounds carefully has been acquired, the niceties of pronunciation are beyond the student's reach, and equally the niceties of spelling are beyond his reach, too.  In ordinary speaking, many vowels and even some consonants are slurred and obscured.  If the ear is not trained to exactness, this habit of slurring introduces many inaccuracies.  Even in careful speaking, many obscure sounds are so nearly alike that only a finely trained ear can detect any difference. 

Who of us notices any difference between {er} in pardoner and {or} in honor?  Careful speakers do not pass over the latter syllable quite so hastily as over the former, but only the most finely trained ear will detect any difference even in the pronunciation of the most finely trained voice.

How to Improve Your English Spelling Skills?

The spelling problem is not to learn how to spell nine tenths of our words correctly.  Nearly all of us can and do accomplish that. The good speller must spell nine hundred and ninety-nine one thousandths of his word correctly, which is quite another matter.

Some of us go even one figure higher.

Our first task is clearly to commit the common irregular words to memory. How may we do that most easily?  It is a huge task at best, but every pound of life energy which we can save in doing it is so much gained for higher efforts.  We should strive to economize effort in this just as the manufacturer tries to economize in the cost of making his goods.

In this particular matter, it seems to the present writer that makers of modern spelling-books have committed a great blunder in mixing indiscriminately regular words with irregular and common words with uncommon.  Clearly we should memorize first the words we use most often, and then take up those which we use less frequently.

How to Master English Spelling

The mastery of English spelling is a serious under-taking.  In the first place, we must actually memorize from one to three thousand words which are spelled in more or less irregular ways.  The best that can be done with these words is to classify them as much as possible and suggest methods of association which will aid the memory.  But after all, the drudgery of memorizing must be gone through with.

Again, those words called homonyms, which are pronounced alike but spelled differently, can be studied only in connection with their meaning, since the meaning and grammatical use in the sentence is our only key to their form.  So we have to go considerably beyond the mere mechanical association of letters.

Besides the two or three thousand common irregular words, the dictionary contains something over two hundred thousand other words. Of course no one of us can possibly have occasion to use all of those words; but at the same time, every one of us may sooner or later have occasion to use any one of them.  As we cannot tell before hand what ones we shall need, we should be prepared to write any or all of them upon occasion.  Of course we may refer to the dictionary; but this is not always, or indeed very often, possible.