Avoiding spelling mistakes.

Storm       

Sometimes the shortest words in English can be the most challenging to spell correctly. Part of the reason for this is that we naturally pay more attention while typing the longer and more difficult words, and can take the shorter words for granted. We think we know how to write the short words, and so we do not make any special effort with them. When we see a word that only has four or five letters, our eyes accept it as a unit, without looking to see if all its letters are in the correct order. So we must rely on other methods to avoid spelling a common word such as storm wrongly as strom, as is sometimes seen in Thai English. As usual, if we place a word in a group alongside other words like it, it is easier to remember its spelling without thinking about it. The word is no longer alone; it has friends and allies. Storm is one of many English words ending with the letters orm, including:

conform

cuneiform

deform

dorm

earthworm

platform

reform

silkworm

uniform

We all know what the noun storm means, and the word’s origins show that unusually, it has changed little when it moved to English from older languages such as German and Dutch. So a storm has been called a storm for many hundreds of years, when violent winds and bad weather create a tempest. Even a modern-sounding term such as storm-window turns out to originate from the early 1800s, and storm surge from the late 1800s. One way to be sure about the spelling would be to invent a sentence using the popular abbreviation for student dormitory building, dorm:

The students did not leave the dorm because of the storm.

Hearing the sound in our ears of what the word storm should be like if we heard it can often help us spell it on the typed page. This is why sentences using rhymes that are easy to remember may be useful for Thai writers of English.

Biography   

For any student or ajarn who uses the Thammasat University Libraries, the word biography is naturally very important. A general search of KOHA for the term biography brings up over 5000 results, and there are probably more biographies than that in the entire collection of the TU Libraries. So it is worth spelling the word correctly, and not wrongly as biogaphy as it is sometimes seen in Thai English. The noun biography refers to the written life of someone written by another person. If people write accounts of their own lives, those are not called biographies but rather autobiographies, or sometimes memoirs. The origins of the word biography are in two Greek words, bios or life and graphia or writing. While any mention of further foreign language sources may seem confusing and complicated to people just trying to get English correct as a foreign language, this example of word origins may be useful. The reason is that the Greek words in question have entered the English language so thoroughly that many words also contain reminders of their meaning. For those who need an explanation of why the Greek word for bios means life, we can look at other English language words where it has that meaning, such as biology, biosphere, and many others:

biotechnology

biodegradable

biostatistics

bioenergetics

bioconversion

biochemical

bioactivities

bioengineering

bioelectrical

biomechanical

biophysicist

biopsy

biotoxin

bionic

We do not need to be scientists to realize after a while that an English word with the letters bio in it probably has something to do with life. In a similar way, the fact that the Greek word graphia refers to writing becomes very familiar when we think of English language words such as

autograph

bibliography

biogeography

biostratigraphic

calligraphy

cardiography

cartography

choreography

chromolithography

cinematography

cryptography

crystallography

demography

discography

electrocardiograph

electroencephalograph

epigraph

ethnography

filmography

geography

graphomania

hagiography

historiography

holography

iconography

lexicography

lithography

mimeograph

monograph

mythography

oceanography

paleography

photography

radiography

scenography

seismographic

spectrographic

telegraph

topography

In all of these words with different meanings, one thing in common is that the letters graph all refer directly to writing something. So when we think of this common part of many words, it should not surprise us to think that in some other language – in this case Greek – the letters graph meant something to do with writing. When we keep this in mind, the only remaining challenge is to make sure that all the letters in graph are included and in the correct order in all these words. Leaving one letter out might change the meaning and would certainly not look good in a scholarly article or thesis. So a sentence may be made up to strengthen our memories of the way common words are spelled:

Greg grabbed the great biography of Graham Greene.

As usual with these created sentences, the meaning is not very important, that a farang student named Greg decided to borrow a biography of the noted British novelist Graham Greene from the TU Libraries collection. More useful is the reminder of the essential presence of the letters gr as the first two letters of graph.

Gentle 

Most Thai writers of English know how to write the word gentle correctly, and the reason it is sometimes a challenge is a question of graphics rather than of misunderstanding the word. We sometimes see the word spelled wrong as geutle with a letter u in the middle instead of the letter n, because on many keyboards, the letter u and the letter n can look similar, especially when they are in the middle of a word. It is easy to hit the wrong key, especially when typing in a hurry, and so it is important to look over whatever has been typed with an eagle eye to make sure there are no such mistaken letters in the text. Usually a spell check will reveal such errors, since geutle is not an English word. There are other letters in English which, depending on the font chosen to write a thesis or scholarly research paper, can look deceptively like other letters. This is one of the challenges of proofreading any research work before it is handed in for evaluation.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)