One of the biggest mistakes second-language writers make is that they assume that because they know their vocabulary in English, they will always spell their words correctly. English is a nasty language when it comes to spelling, however. When publishing their articles in newspapers, journalists (should) have their work double-checked and triple-checked before it gets online or into print. In fact, the Jakarta Globe newspaper used to have seven levels of checking before a story got to the print edition! This is not because they had bad writers \u2014 although everybody needs a little polishing \u2014 but because they wanted to make sure that the writing was accurate and well-presented.<\/p>\n
It is not only difficult for second language speakers. Grammar can be universally confusing when trying to construct complex sentences. Native speakers also struggle due to the strange spellings of some words. Take for example the words: \u2018know\u2019, \u2018comb\u2019, \u2018walk\u2019, \u2018address\u2019, \u2018misspell\u2019, and \u2018accommodate\u2019. The first three words contain silent letters (the \u2018k\u2019, \u2018b\u2019, and \u2018l\u2019 respectively) but change the way we speak the words (they would be \u2018now\u2019, \u2018com\u2019 like dot.com, and \u2018wak\u2019 if we didn\u2019t notice the \u2018silent\u2019 letters). So, these are letters that are doing extra work while still being \u2018silent\u2019\u2026 Weird. The second batch of words (\u2018address\u2019, \u2018misspell\u2019, and \u2018accommodate\u2019) contains double letters, not just once, but twice. And then we come to the spelling nightmare that is \u2018Mississippi\u2019.<\/p>\n
Why is there an \u2018h\u2019 in the middle of vehicles? We don\u2019t say \u2018vee-hickles\u2019, we say \u2018veeickles\u2019. What help does the \u2018k\u2019 at the start of \u2018knife\u2019 give us? Or the \u2018w\u2019 in \u2018sword\u2019? All of these things are confusing but because native speakers learn these ideas when they are young and flexible, they adapt. But what are they adapting to? English is a massive mix of other languages and influences from other cultures. The modern version of English is influenced by French, Greek, Latin, German, and many more languages. All of these languages have their own grammar rules and spelling styles (this is why British English uses the French spelling of \u2018colour\u2019, while American English uses \u2018color\u2019). So even within the language there are variations of spellings.<\/p>\n
Native speakers use spell-check and grammar check, because 99.9% of us make mistakes when writing in such as complicated language. It is there to stop us looking foolish and it does a fine job of picking up differences between similar words (there, their, they\u2019re). The moral of this story is: TURN ON YOUR SPELL-CHECKER!<\/p>\n
Note: the author was assisted 21 times<\/em> in the writing of this article by the spell-checker. Thanks, MS Word for saving my professional pride! ?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the biggest mistakes second-language writers make is that they assume that because they know their vocabulary in English, they will always spell their words correctly. English is a nasty language when it comes to spelling, however. When publishing their articles in newspapers, journalists (should) have their work double-checked and triple-checked before it gets […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=720"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":721,"href":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720\/revisions\/721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}