why the best spellers misspell words
daughter 2.0 is entering her school spelling bee, so as her father and the better speller of her parents (and the one who’s home right now), i’m helping her.
as we wait for the school’s fourth grade spelling list, we’re working with a different fourth grade spelling list. most of the words are easy enough for her, but we did happen upon one that she needed help with: remember.
remember is a sensible word to struggle with, since part of it repeats. one of the difficulties of spelling is keeping track of where you are in a word, and if “it’s the e before m” isn’t distinct — in remember’s case, it can refer to either of two positions in a word — you need to find a way around that. one way is to chunk it: to separate it into components such that the repetion is lost enough. for us, this meant turning remember into re-mem-ber. in this way, the first e before the m becomes the e in the first chunk, the ms are before and after the e, and the second e is surrounded by ms and thus distinct from the first one, which has no ms. and then the final trick is to be falsely repetitive in saying e after hearing the e in b. you may briefly think you’re spelling remembeer instead of remember, but once you’ve turned spelling the word into a habit, it feels natural. and eventually, the feeling that you’ve just used two es in a row goes away because familiarity with spelling turns extra sounds off, in a way.
so that’s one word she struggled with. she’s been fine with most of the others, and i am nothing if not an overpreparer — i’d rather have something i don’t need than need something i don’t have — so i went bigger. i know from watching the spelling bee, which i’d rather watch than nearly anything else, that command of word roots turns a good speller into a champion speller, so i went looking, and i found two excellent resources.
the first turns a lovely math hose on the spelling bee, showing anyone who didn’t know that latin, french and middle english form the basis of much of our words (our most common words are germanic, but nobody at the national spelling bee level is being asked to spell the or hand). if i were making a starter pack of tough spelling bee words, i’d go french for silent letters, latin for weird double consonants and middle english for general weirdness, though i’d also add all 20 hebrew words used.
why?
because 55 percent of spellers miss them. no other language’s words fare so poorly.
and why? because their roots are unfamiliar to spellers/coaches who dive into germanic and romance language roots and bank on not getting the one hebrew word that year.
they’re not wrong to go that route, mind. 20 versus 1,445 is not competitive. but of those 1,445, how many use a combination of the same 50 or so roots that also pop up in casual daily reading? i’d venture more than a few. i’d also venture most of those hebrew words don’t pop up in casual daily reading. i’d further venture the person who misspelled minyan as minion didn’t know the hebrew word at all. if i were maximizing my time — and you have to; there are too many words to know them all — i’d teach the most common roots too. i’m simply too paranoid to not focus on the most obvious linguistic pothole.
misspellings were the third place i went in my spelling bee prep for daughter 2.0. see, i don’t want to know what words are getting spelled properly. that’s most of them. i want to know what words are getting missed the most. the answer: metastasize, metonymy and weimaraner. so i had daughter 2.0 spell them until she had them down. from there, we’ll drill them daily until they’re habit. we’ll also add words, such as minyan (similar to another word), lefse (no root to hang on) and farcical (shared root). (then there are these, some of which seem easy to this former student of french but all of which would probably elicit an “okay, no” from daughter 2.0.)
in this way, we’ll build on the three general kinds of words she’s going to need to know: foreign ones that sound similar, words with no relation to anything else and (the big one) words with shared roots. because (though farce isn’t on that page) if you know farce, you know farcical. but spelling it pharcicle or farsicle belies a lack of knowledge of the root. similarly, if you don’t hear the nym in metonymy, you misspell it the way the other four misspellers did: metonomy. the nym, by the way, is the nym in synonym.
curiously, while metonymy and metastasize both start with the meta- prefix, they don’t share early misspellings: metastasize is misspelled mata- half the time, but all four of metonymy’s misspellings nail the meto, only to miss the first y.
further research may show which roots trip people up the most across all misspelled words. until then, we have only this. and it’s … not as useful as it could be.
linked resources for your spelling studying needs:
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