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.
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