English Spelling

,

• Publisher: Collins
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780007363834
• eBook ISBN: 9780007444670
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Writing & Presentation Skills

Collins Webster’s Easy Learning Spelling is suitable for anyone who wants to improve their spelling and write more accurately and impressively. By describing the important features of English spelling, rules to use, and pitfalls to avoid, this e-book makes spelling easy.

Using simple explanations, backed up with examples to demonstrate each point, Collins Webster’s Easy English Spelling describes the patterns and rules you need to understand and predict how words are spelled in English. It also provides practical advice on learning words whose spellings are not easy to predict, and shows why some words can present difficulties for even the most experienced users of English.

With its alphabetical index of tricky words, along with useful tips for memorising these, Collins Webster’s Easy English Spelling is a valuable resource for all users of English who want to become good spellers.

Patterns and building blocks

Some groups of letters appear in many different English words. Often a group of letters will indicate the same thing in every word where it appears. For example, the letters RE at the start of a word usually mean “again.”

Because so many words are made up of these building blocks, you don’t need to learn every spelling individually. Often you can spell out a word by adding together the blocks of letters that form the word. So it is important to know what these blocks are, how they are joined to the rest of a word, and what they mean.

Building blocks at the start of words

A block of letters that regularly appears at the start of words and carries a meaning is called a prefix. A prefix can be attached in front of another word or block of letters to create a new word with a different meaning.

For example, when the letters UN are added to another word (called a root word), they add the meaning of “not” to the sense of the other word.

unnatural

unknown

unholy

Notice that you can spell these words by splitting them into the prefix and the root word, as the spelling of the root word stays the same.

It is not always so obvious that a prefix is being added to an existing word to make a new word. Many prefixes occur in words that came to English from Latin and Greek. In these cases the blocks to which they are joined are often Latin or Greek forms rather than familiar English words. Nevertheless, it is worth studying these building blocks and noting that they occur in many English words.

The pref...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Introduction
• Contents
• The Basics of Spelling
• Why You Need to Work at Spelling
• Patterns and Building Blocks
• Spelling Rules
• Tips for Learning Hard Words
• Words with Silent Letters
• Single and Double Letters
• Words with Foreign Spelling Patterns
• Confusable Words
• False Friends
• Other Commonly Misspelled Words
• Index of Hard Words