While Randy is on hiatus recovering from a writing-induced ailment, some friends are taking up the slack. Today’s post is by Penny Mattern.
As a writer learning your craft, it’s important for you to write as much as you can, for practice as well as for publication.
Almost as important as getting that first draft down is going back, preferably at a later time, and editing your writing. Think of it this way: it’s not enough to wash that shirt, you have to iron it to make it look presentable.
Correct spelling is part of that finishing process.
For those who send their shirts out to the laundry for washing and pressing, that is, use spell checkers to vet spelling, more is needed — much like finding a hole in the shirt that needs mending.
A spell checker won’t flag or change a homonymic misspelling, that is, when you’ve substituted another word that sounds the same (or very similar) for the one you intend (e.g., hear | here).
To help with this problem, I’ve assembled a set of easy, some will say trivial, exercises that point up a few such problems.
Give them a try. The exercises are in a PDF file here.
Print the PDF page and use a pencil or pen to fill in the blanks. If you get any wrong, do the exercises again another day till you get them right.
For those who find this whole thing laughably easy and trivial, congratulations. But you would be surprised how much of this I see around the internet, sometimes in the most surprising places, which is what caused me to create this exercise in the first place.
The answers are in a second PDF file, here.
The Writing Assignment: Spelling Exercise by Penny G. Mattern, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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