Avoiding spelling mistakes.

Safety    

This important word, meaning to be free from danger or risk is sometimes spelled wrong in Thai English as safty. One way to avoid this mistake would be to just remember that you cannot have the word safety without the word safe. Possibly the error happens because people are not pronouncing the word correctly. When we say the word safety, we hear the word safe, with the letter a sounding very clearly. If the word is spelled wrong as safty, then clearly the letter a would not sound the same. Another alternate wrong spelling in English is salety. This seems like an odd mistake to make, but it is due to people writing in a hurry and confusing the letter f with the letter l. There is some resemblance between the letter f and the letter l, especially in lower case form, but keep an eye out for the little cross that is always found in the letter f, and try to avoid confusing it with any other letter.

Cuisine    

Food is an important part of Thai culture, so the word cuisine is also significant. It means a special way of cooking with certain ingredients and techniques, usually found in one particular place. The Thammasat University Libraries own many books about cuisine of different nations and styles, including the cuisine of the Ch’ing Dynasty in China; Modern Caribbean cuisine; Malaysian and Thai cuisine; American cuisine; Steam cuisine; French cuisine; and many others. Cuisine is a French word, literally meaning kitchen, but in Thai English this word is often spelled wrong as cusine. This is particularly awkward because in the French language, the word cousine means a female cousin, so if you spell the word wrong as cusine, someone who can read French may think you are trying to discuss a female cousin. As often with mistakes in Thai English, there is an easy way to avoid this error. It is to be as simple and plain as possible. If you have any doubt at all about the correct spelling of the word cuisine or you think you might possibly make a mistake when writing it, just choose a different word instead that you know how to write correctly. The word food is perfectly good and can easily replace cuisine in all uses. Yet to sound more elegant, refined, or intelligent, some writers try to use the word cuisine instead, and fail to make a good impression because they spell it wrong. This example applies to many other words that are often spelled wrong in Thai English. There is no point in trying to make a refined impression by using a more elegant word if it will be spelled wrong. Stick to simple words that you are sure you can spell correctly, and you will make an excellent impression. Often in Asia, a very complex form of English writing is seen as a standard to aim for, especially in theses and academic articles. This overlooks the fact that many of the greatest writers in English were also the simplest in terms of using short, easily understood words. In a thesis or academic article, the main point is to be understood and to communicate your ideas as clearly and directly as possible. Your reader will not care if you use a long or short word to do so. The longer your word or sentence is, the more likely you are to make a mistake. So keep words and sentences as short as possible, and you are likely to avoid a lot of problems and mistakes when writing. Also, until you are are certain that your English writing is perfect, avoid as much as possible using foreign language words, whether they are from French, Latin, German, Italian, or any other language. The only thing worse than making lots of mistakes in writing English as a foreign language is making even more mistakes in other languages at the same time.

Written  

Maybe in part because of the anxiety associated with the act of writing in Thai English, the word written is sometimes spelled wrong. It is wrongly written as writed and wrongly written as writen. Both mistakes can be avoided, because in some situations the word itself can be avoided. For example, if in a thesis or academic article, you are discussing a literary work or book, you can just write

King Lear by Shakespeare.

or

Shakespeare’s King Lear.

There is no need to write

King Lear written by Shakespeare.

You can safely assume that your reader will know that King Lear is a play and since it is by Shakespeare, he must be the one who wrote it. If you are describing a film, you can mention the screenplay by without having to say screenplay written by for similar reasons. Once you mention that someone created the screenplay, it is clear that whoever created it wrote it, since a screenplay is something that must be written. In these ways you can avoid having to write the word written entirely.

In other cases you may have to use the word written, and for that purpose, it is worth getting familiar with it. It may seem an odd-looking word, since it begins with the letters wr, and when we say the word, the letter w is not pronounced, only the letter r. This may seem annoying to the Thai English writer but if we remember many other words that begin with the letters wr, we see that written is just one of many examples, and it begins to look more familiar:

wrap

wraparound

wrapping

wrath

wrathful

wreck

wreckage

wren

wrench

wrestle

wrestlers

wretched

wriggle

wrinkled

wristband

wristwatch

write-off

wrong

As we see, written has a lot of company among words of its type. The two most frequently found wrong spellings for written are the result of two different types of error. A Thai English writer will use the incorrect verb writed as an attempt to find a past tense form of the verb to write. Without getting into rules of grammar that probably bored you in English class, wrote is the past tense of the verb to write. Written belongs to a slightly different form of language, called the past participle. It is not necessary to remember your lessons about past participles, especially if you did not enjoy them years ago. Just try to avoid using written if you are not sure about its spelling. Writers who are not confident about how the word should look also sometimes spell it wrong as writen. Here again the sound of the word can be a helpful hint, since the word written has the sound ritt in in, and not the sound of the word write. Based on the way it is pronounced, it should be clear there are two letter t’s in written instead of just once.

Writer, writing.

Further anxiety about writing English may be the cause of more misspellings, when the word writer is spelled wrong as writter and the word writing is spelled wrong as writting. As mentioned before, try to use pronunciation as a clue. When we say the word writing, the word write should sound clearly, rhyming with bite, blight, bright, brite, fight, flight, fright, height, kite, knight, might, night, plight, sight, smite, spite, tight, trite, and white, among many other words. If writer and writing were each spelled with two letter t’s, this would change the sound of the words. Instead of hearing the word write in them, we would hear the word writ, a legal term, which rhymes with split, admit, befit, remit, and unfit. This is clearly not the case.

(all images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)