Avoiding spelling mistakes.

March 

The English word march is one of those short, familiar terms that are sometimes seen spelled wrong in Thai English. March has different meanings that can usually be guessed according to the context of a sentence. As a verb, it means to walk in military style with a rhythmic step, sometimes accompanied by music. A decisive form of progress, to march means to advance in a way that may be difficult to stop. The old saying in English, time marches on, refers to this significance of the verb march. As a capitalized noun, March means the third month of the year. A third meaning for march which may be known to students or ajarns who have travelled in the United Kingdom or Italy is a frontier or border area between two countries or territories. The Welsh Marches are located between England and Wales. In Italy, the Marches is an area in the east central part of the country, located between the Apennines and the Adriatic Sea. With all these significant meanings, it is unfortunate that the word march is seen spelled mistakenly in Thai English as marh. To avoid this problem, it may be helpful to keep a close eye on shorter words in English. Because they are short and often familiar, we may let down our guard and feel sure we know how to spell them. They we pay less attention when writing them and do not bother to use spell check or reread what we have written. If we had used spell check, or even looked at the Word document after typing the wrong spelling, there should be a red line under the mistaken word, altering us that something is wrong. Of course, not every red line under a term in a Word document means that we have spelled something wrong. It may just mean that it is a foreign term or some other word that is not in the usual list of words in the spell check program. This means that as often with computerized advice, we must also use our own thoughts to decide what to do. The red line under the word is only meant as a potential warning flag. We may eventually decide that the warning is to be ignored. Or we may discover that there is indeed a problem, and a more formal spell check would be useful. Even without taking a few seconds to think about whether or not to proceed with a spell check, there may be other ways to not fall into the trap of writing this word in an incorrect fashion. When words are short, they have the advantage of containing a number of letters that are easily counted. So, if we look even casually at the word march, we should see that it has five letters. We should have an instinct about this, even if we do not consciously count the letters. The incorrect spelling in this case leaves out a letter. Whether the letter is left out through simple carelessness or too hasty typing does not matter. But they resulting wrong spelling has only four letters. Even if we look quickly at a page we have just typed, it should be easy to tell apart a word with five letters from a word with four letters. If we develop this instinct, then we can be our own spell check program, having a sense that something may be wrong if a word seems shorter than we expected. In the same way, with this approach, if vowels are left out of a word when we type it too quickly, we might also tell by a mere glance that all sorts of consonants in a word are much too close to one another. For example, if instead of marh, our wrong spelling had been

mrch

Clearly this is not a word in English, so if we take the time to look at this misspelling it should be immediately clear how to fix it. Note that this is a matter of inner feeling, not because of any rule. If we try to make a rule in English learning about why we should feel something is wrong with an English word that has four consonants in a row, then we quickly find that in fact there are a number of English words with four consonants in a row. These include:

• Country
• Birthday
• Everything
• System
• Syllable
• Sydney
• Strength
• Cycle
• Mystery
• Healthy
• Photosynthesis
• Pennsylvania
• Rhyme
• Syllabicate
• Syllabication
• Crystal
• Hungry
• Physical
• Thirsty
• Anything
• Gangster
• Thanksgiving
• Friendship
• Marshmallow
• Worthless
• Hydrogen
• Warmth
• Thoughts
• Physics
• Recycle
• Eighty
• Naughty
• Lightboard
• Rhythm
• Apocalypse
• Lightning
• Chemistry
• Twelfth
• Recycling
• Weightlifting
• Dumpster
• Girlfriend
• Cyclone
• Egypt
• Ecosystem
• Earthquake
• Empty
• Nightmare
• gymnastics

As is often the case, when we are in a rush to complete an academic research project or theses, it may be better not to rely on rules we think we remember from English class. It can be better to use instinct, especially if we have grown familiar with certain aspects of English writing. This is because there are often exceptions to rules in English. The general advice to look more closely at short words, even if they seem familiar also works well to avoid other mistaken spellings. For example, the mistaken spelling marh as mentioned above is also seen in Thai English as a wrong spelling for the word mark. In this case, the problem is not just that we may have been typing too fast to be very careful. There is also the issue that some typed letters in English look quite similar. If we look closely, we can tell apart a letter h from a letter k. But if we are in a hurry, we may not pay close enough attention. This problem occurs so often in the English language that there is even a term to describe it. The word homoglyph means the same letter or character. As all students and ajarns will have noticed, on a computer keyboard, the digit zero and the capital letter O (0 & O) are very easy to confuse. Also the the digit one, the lowercase letter L and the uppercase i (1, l & I). Anyone writing in English must have a keen eye to tell these apart, although in some cases, spell check will alert us if we have typed the wrong one instead of the character we meant to type. Some combinations cause other problems by looking similar. For example if the letter r follows the letter n, then the resulting combination rn can look like the letter m. If we must type the letter c followed by the letter l, the resulting combination cl can look a lot like the letter d. Still another example is when we must type the letter v followed by another letter v in a word, and the resulting combination of vv looks quite like a letter w. Even native born English speakers make this mistakes when typing English texts too quickly. It may be impossible to eliminate this problem entirely. Still, if we approach the issue with the right attitude, we may make progress, Not being too sure that we have spelled everything right is one first step. If we approach the challenge with modesty and always doublecheck what we have written, chances are we will catch many of these errors before they are submitted in a final academic research paper or thesis. The goal is avoid looking sloppy when an editor or ajarn reads what we have written. The little bit of extra attention can have excellent results, if we are determined to solve this challenge.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)