LEARN TO SPELL
This is a website about spelling, especially to help people who find it difficult and for people trying to help them. There are people who want to write, or need to, and who know exactly what they want to say, but who have difficulty in writing it. The biggest difficulty is usually with spelling. Not being able to produce correct writing causes terrible frustration for huge numbers of people, schoolchildren, foremen, managers, students; all these and many more have got to be able to write to do their work quickly and easily. And there are a lot more people who just need to write occasionally, applying for jobs, filling in forms, writing to friends and family. It is a shame if you are longing to write a tirade to the newspaper or to send a message to a friend and you can't get it down on paper. Almost everybody can find the words and put them together all right, but far too many are frustrated or prevented altogether because they can't spell.
If you want to get started straight away with improving your spelling or helping someone else with theirs, click on Learning Individual Words and then on First Things First: How to Select the Words to Study. These two pages tell you all you need to know to get on with the job of becoming a more confident and successful speller.
But you might also like to know more about the problem and to understand both the causes of shaky spelling and the reasons behind the advice given here, so there is more on other pages.
Is it our spelling system? People do complain a lot about it. Is it too difficult to learn and, if so, why don't we change it? Click on Our Spelling System
Many uncertain spellers wonder what happened to them. Was there something wrong with them or is there just a lucky "gift" for spelling which they missed out on? Will they be able to learn now? Click on A Gift for Spelling?.
Is it the teachers' fault? Click on Teaching
What else could it be? Click on What Else?
Some people think we shouldn't make such a fuss about spelling and that it doesn't matter how you write words. So there is a page on Why Bother Anyway?
If you would like to know where these ideas come from, my name is Susan Greig and I am a teacher and researcher with degrees in languages and educational psychology. So the ideas come from my experience of teaching adults and children and of studying the workings of the language and of the way our minds work with it. My email address is sugreig4AThotmail.com (replace the AT with @. This is to avoid automatic emails being sent).