What is right? “Misspelt” or “Misspelled”? July 24, 2008
Posted by Amal in Did You Know, Editing, English Usage, Technical Writing Basics, english.Tags: Common errors, Misspelled words, Spelling mistakes
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To err is human, and even a technical documenter has to brush up the grammar skills at times. So what are the most common mistakes in a technical publication?
• Spellings
• Punctuations
In this post let us discuss about some common spell errors. Tricks of the trade are to know why they are considered errors and why these are bound to get unnoticed.
Since Microsoft Word or any other good document editor comes with integrated spell checker, we’d emphasize on words which are not wrong according to English spell checks but dependant on usage, along with other common spelling mistakes.
1. Usage of Homonyms
These homonyms may occur in our technical documents, we should know the meaning and use the right word where required.
Accept / Except
Advice / Advised
Assent / Ascent
Aught / Ought
Affect / Effect
Cite / Site / Sight
Cash / Cache
Complement / Compliment
Council / Counsel
Its / It’s
Lose / Loose
Personal / Personnel
Principal / Principle
Stationary / Stationery
Than / Then
Their / There / They’re
Whose / Who’s
Your / You’re
2. Words with double consonants
Normally word spell checker will rectify these type of errors automatically.
Recommend
Accommodate
Committee
Different
Matter
Appointment
Address
Aggressive
Suppress
Fulfill
Irregular
And these words don’t have any double consonants though often misspelled:
Pavilion
Apartment
Biased
Omit
Skillful
3. Words that end with –ance and –able
Extravagant
Occurrence
Compatible
Irresistible
Performance
4. Words that end with –ceed and –sede
Proceed
Precede
Exceed
Supersede
5. Silent e
When words end with “e” and are silent for example – “Write” or “Excite” we generally drop the “e” while adding suffix for example “Writing” and “Exciting”. There’s an exception to this rule, when the suffix begins with a consonant, for example “Excitement”
6. “ei” or “ie”
Piece
Receive
Fiend
Leisure
Weird
Either
Seize
7. Confusing Additions on adding a suffix
• Sometimes the last consonant of a prefix gets doubled when a suffix is added (drag / dragged, brag / bragged)
• When the last consonant of prefix is “y”, sometimes it is changed to “i”. (Try becomes tries but remain trying)
