How To-132: "How to Improve Your Spelling Skills"

How to Improve Your Spelling Skills

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Have you ever searched over your paper/essay/article looking for mistakes, typos, and misspellings? Do you find yourself spending a lot of time referencing a dictionary? With a little work (and some time), you can improve your accuracy. There will always be that 'one that got away', but you will save a lot of time in the long run.

Steps

1. Buy yourself a word search magazine, do a search to find puzzles on-line, or maybe, borrow some word searches from friends.
   
2. Use the list that comes with each word search to know what words to look for.
   
3. Using the list is helpful, but once you have gained enough experience, you will find the list almost unnecessary. Give yourself an extra challenge by not using the list.
   
4. Look for words in the puzzles, and then start looking for words without using the list...perhaps pitting yourself against the puzzle by seeing if you can find all the words without the list.
   
5. Notice that you will start to recognize patterns, as well as, knowing what order the letters are likely to be in.
   
6. Play word games, for instance, Scrabble. This will help you increase your word building skills.
   
7. Use the Internet. There are sites that will give you ideas on what to look for. A couple of sites are these two OWLs (online writing lab).[1][2]

Tips

. You will need, more than anything, the desire to improve these skills and an interest in word search puzzles.

• Always remember that words will read both ways, frontwards and backwards.
  
• Puzzles can be found in large and small print and different degrees of difficulty. Look around.
  
• Remember, you are exercising your brain. Like any exercise, the more you do it, the better you get.

Warnings

• Doing puzzles can create the desire to do more puzzles and more types of puzzles. You are much better off finding on-line sources of free puzzles, because you will probably save money that way.

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Sources and Citations

• http://www.allstarpuzzles.com/ This site is free and has a VERY wide variety of puzzles to choose from, and note: this site is in part the basis of this article.

1. ↑ http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/561/01/


2. ↑ http://ualr.edu/owl/proofreading.htm

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