Anker Susan. Real Essays with Readings with 2009 MLA Update

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EDITING ESSAYS

Chapter 35 • Commonly Confused Words 657

4. I should ( have / of ) made a hard copy and a backup on a disk, but I

didn’t.

5. Today I have ( a / an / and ) interview for a job I really want, and I can’t

locate any résumés ( accept / except ) one from 2003.

6. ( Loosing / Losing ) a résumé is not the end of the world, but it will be

( quiet / quite ) a job reconstructing it.

7. It took me hours to ( right / write ) and proofread my most recent

résumé.

8. This morning, I quickly ( set / sit ) down some information to give to

the interviewer, but this version is sloppier ( than / then ) the résumé I

( use / used ) to have.

9. ( Though / Through ) I believe that I am well qualiﬁ ed for this job, I’m

afraid that this résumé may have a bad ( affect / effect ) on my chances of

being hired.

10. An interviewer ( who’s / whose ) task is to hire the best person must pay

attention ( to / too / two ) small details.

Edit Paragraphs and Your Own Writing

Edit the following paragraphs for commonly confused words.

EDITING REVIEW 1 (18 errors)

(1) Most people no that Americans love to drive there cars. (2) How-

ever, many people may not be conscience of how much the government

does to support our car culture. (3) For instance, the United States would

never of had so many good highways without federal and state assistance

for road construction and maintenance. (4) New highways are usually

■ For more practice

with commonly

confused words, visit

Exercise Central at

bedfordstmartins

.com/realessays.

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EDITING ESSAYS

658 Part Six • Word Use

paid for mainly buy tax money. (5) It is rare for a new road too be paid

for with tolls, which would come exclusively from the people driving on it.

(6) Americans also expect they’re roads to be well maintained, and they

may right to their representatives to complain about potholes and aging

road surfaces. (7) The government is even responsible for keeping gas

prices lower here then in most other industrialized nations.

(8) Few people mine that the government assists drivers in these

ways. (9) Some would argue that its a government’s job to help pay for

transportation. (10) However, other forms of transportation in this coun-

try are often past over when Congress hands out funds. (11) Amtrak, the

U.S. railroad, may soon loose virtually all government funds, even though

many government ofﬁ cials are skeptical of it’s ability to keep operating

without government assistance. (12) Accept for a few places like New

York and San Francisco, most U.S. cities do not have good mass transit

systems. (13) Americans who’s travels have taken them to certain parts of

the world praise the national train systems and city transit systems they

ﬁ nd there. (14) As trafﬁ c gets worse in our nation’s urban and suburban

areas, some people ﬁ ne it odd that the United States does not invest more

in transportation that would allow people to leave there cars at home.

EDITING REVIEW 2 (14 errors)

(1) Hoping to keep are nation’s blood supply safe, the U.S. govern-

ment has placed restrictions on donating blood. (2) Anyone whose spent

more than ﬁ ve years in Europe or more than three months in England

since 1980 is not allowed to give blood. (3) Ofﬁ cials hope that asking

about time in Europe will help them ﬁ ne people who might of been

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EDITING ESSAYS

Chapter 35 • Commonly Confused Words 659

exposed to mad cow disease. (4) Men are also asked whether they have

had sexual relations with other men in the passed ten years. (5) If they

have, their asked not to give blood. (6) This is suppose to protect the

blood supply from the AIDS virus. (7) Of course, they’re are some prob-

lems with these restrictions. (8) First, know one knows how much ex-

posure to infected meat can give a person mad cow disease, and know

one is sure how long the disease can hide in a human body. (9) Second,

many gay men our not infected with HIV, and many women, who are not

asked about sexual activity, are infected. (10) Restricting certain groups

of people from giving blood may not do anything to protect the blood

supply, but it will certainly effect the amount of blood available. (11) Is it

better to allow the blood supply to become dangerously low then to allow

people who’s blood might carry a disease to donate blood?

PRACTICE 2 EDITING YOUR OWN WRITING

FOR COMMONLY CONFUSED WORDS

As a ﬁ nal practice, edit a piece of your own writing for commonly confused

words. It can be a paper you are working on for this course, a paper you’ve

already ﬁ nished, a paper for another course, a recent piece of writing from

your work or everyday life, or your idea journal entry. Add any misused words

you ﬁ nd to your personal list of confusing words.

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660

Spelling

Using the Right Letters

Understand the Importance

of Spelling Correctly

Unfortunately, spelling errors are easy for readers to spot, and they make

a bad impression. Fortunately, practice greatly improves spelling.

Read the following paragraph, the body of a follow-up letter one stu-

dent wrote to a prospective employer after an interview:

Thank you for the oportunity to meet about the summer internship at

Margate Associates. I hope you will ﬁ nd that my coursework in graphic

design and my excellant communication skills make me a promiseing

candidate for the position. I look forward to hearing from you soon. I am

happy to provide you with referances if you need them.

PRACTICE 1 FINDING SPELLING ERRORS

Underline the four spelling errors in the preceding paragraph. In the space

provided, write the correct spelling of each word.

If you are serious about improving your spelling, you need to have a

dictionary and a spelling list (a list of words you often misspell) — and you

need to use them.

■ IDEA JOURNAL

Describe a place in

your town or city.

■ For more spelling

practice, visit

Exercise Central at

bedfordstmartins

.com/realessays.

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EDITING ESSAYS

Chapter 36 • Spelling 661

A dictionary contains the correct spellings of words, along with in-

formation on how they are pronounced, what they mean, and where they

came from. When proofreading your papers, use a current dictionary either

in print or online. The following are two popular online dictionaries:

• Merriam-Webster Online at www.m-w.com. This dictionary has a

wildcard search feature. If you are fairly sure how the beginning of a

word is spelled, you can enter those letters and then an asterisk (*) and

get a list of the words that begin with the letters. From the list, you can

choose the word you want.

• Your Dictionary at www.yourdictionary.com. This site features

specialty dictionaries for business, computers, law, medicine, and other

ﬁ elds.

If you have trouble ﬁ nding words in a regular dictionary, get a spelling

dictionary, which is designed to help you ﬁ nd a word even if you have no

idea how to spell it. Checking a dictionary is the single most important

thing you can do to improve your spelling.

Keeping a spelling list will help you edit your papers and learn how

to write the words correctly. From this list of words you often misspell,

identify your personal spelling “demons” — the ﬁ ve to ten words that you

misspell most frequently. Write these words, spelled correctly, on an index

card, and keep the card somewhere handy so that you can consult it when-

ever you write.

Practice Spelling Correctly

Don’t try to correct your grammar, improve your message, and check

your spelling at the same time. Instead, do separate proofreading passes

for each editing task.

Most word-processing programs have a spell checker that ﬁ nds and

highlights a word that may be misspelled and suggests other spellings.

However, no spell checker can catch every mistake. A spell checker ignores

anything it recognizes as a word, so it will not help you ﬁ nd words that are

misused or misspellings that are also words. For example, a spell checker

would not highlight any of the problems in the following phrases:

Just to it. (Correct: Just do it.)

The strap is lose. (Correct: The strap is loose.)

my writing coarse (Correct: my writing course)

■ For a sample diction-

ary entry, see page 634.

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EDITING ESSAYS

662 Part Six • Word Use

Use the following proofreading techniques to focus on the spelling

of one word at a time. Different techniques work for different people, so

try them all and then decide which ones work for you.

PROOFREADING TECHNIQUES

•

Put a piece of paper or a ruler under the line you are reading.

• Cut a “window” in an index card that is about the size of a

long word (such as misunderstanding), and place it over your

writing to focus on one word or phrase at a time.

• Proofread your paper backward, one word at a time.

• If you are using a computer, print out a version of your paper

that looks noticeably different: Make the words larger, make

the margins larger, triple-space the lines, or do all of these.

Read this version carefully.

• Read your paper aloud. This strategy will help you if you tend

to leave words out.

• Exchange papers with a partner. Your only task as you proof-

read your partner’s paper should be to identify possible

misspellings.

After you proofread each word in your paper, look at your personal

spelling list and your list of demon words one more time. If you used

any of these words in your paper, go back and check their spelling again.

(Most word-processing programs allow you to search for speciﬁ c words

using Find or Search commands from the Edit menu.) You may be sur-

prised to ﬁ nd that you missed seeing the same old spelling mistakes.

PRACTICE 2 FINDING AND CORRECTING SPELLING MISTAKES

Take a paper you are working on, and ﬁ nd and correct any spelling errors

using the tools discussed previously — a dictionary, your personal spelling list,

proofreading techniques, and a spell checker. How many spelling mistakes did

you ﬁ nd? Were you surprised? How was the experience different from what

you normally do to edit for spelling?

Five Steps to Better Spelling

Learning to ﬁ nd and correct spelling mistakes that you have already made is

only half the battle. You also need to become a better speller so that you do

not make so many mistakes in the ﬁ rst place. Here are ﬁ ve ways to do so.

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EDITING ESSAYS

Chapter 36 • Spelling 663

Step 1. Master Ten Troublemakers

The ten words on the following list were identiﬁ ed by writing teachers as

the words most commonly misspelled. Because there are only ten, you

should be able to memorize them.

INCORRECT CORRECT

alot a lot

arguement argument

deﬁ nate, defenite deﬁ nite

develope develop

lite light

necesary, nesesary necessary

recieve receive

seperate separate

surprize, suprise surprise

untill until

Step 2. Master Your Personal Spelling Demons

Once you know what your personal spelling demons are, you can master

them. Try some of the following techniques.

• Create a memory aid — an explanation or saying that will remind you of

the correct spelling. For example, “surprise is no prize” may remind you

to spell surprise with an s, not a z.

• Break the word into parts, and try to master each part. You can break

it into syllables (Feb ru ar y) or separate the preﬁ xes and endings (dis

appoint ment).

• Write the word correctly ten times.

• Write a paragraph in which you use the word at least three times.

• Say the letters of the word out loud. See if there’s a rhythm or a rhyme

you can memorize.

• Say the whole word out loud, emphasizing each letter and syllable even

if that’s not the way you normally say it. For example, say prob a bly in-

stead of prob ly. Try to pronounce the word this way in your head each

time you spell it.

• Ask a partner to give you a spelling test.

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EDITING ESSAYS

664 Part Six • Word Use

Step 3. Master Commonly Confused Words

Refer back to Chapter 35, which covers twenty-seven sets of words that

are commonly confused because they sound alike, such as write/right and

its/it’s. If you can master these commonly confused words, you will avoid

many spelling mistakes.

Step 4. Learn Six Spelling Rules

If you can remember the following six rules, you can avoid or correct

many of the spelling errors in your writing.

Before the six rules, here is a quick review of vowels and consonants.

Vowels: a e i o u and sometimes y

Consonants: all the letters that are not vowels

The letter y can be either a vowel or a consonant. It is a vowel when it

sounds like the y in ﬂ y or hungry. It is a consonant when it sounds like the

y in yellow.

Rule 1. I before e / Except after c / Or when sounded like a / As in

neighbor or weigh.

Many people repeat this rhyme to themselves as they decide whether a

word is spelled with an ie or an ei.

piece (i before e) receive (except after c) eight (sounds like a)

EXCEPTIONS: either, neither, foreign, height, seize, society, their,

weird

Rule 2. Drop the ﬁ nal e when adding an ending that begins with a

vowel.

hope + ing = hoping imagine + ation = imagination

Keep the ﬁ nal e when adding an ending that begins with a consonant.

achieve + ment = achievement deﬁ nite + ly = deﬁ nitely

EXCEPTIONS: argument, awful, simply, truly (and others)

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EDITING ESSAYS

Chapter 36 • Spelling 665

Rule 3. When adding an ending to a word that ends in y, change

the y to i when a consonant comes before the y.

lonely + est = loneliest apology + ize = apologize

happy + er = happier likely + hood = likelihood

Do not change the y when a vowel comes before the y.

boy + ish = boyish survey + or = surveyor

pay + ment = payment buy + er = buyer

EXCEPTIONS 1. When adding -ing to a word ending in y, always

keep the y, even if a consonant comes before it:

study + ing = studying.

2. Other exceptions include daily, dryer, said, and paid.

Rule 4. When adding an ending that starts with a vowel to a one-

syllable word, double the ﬁ nal consonant only if the word ends with

a consonant-vowel-consonant.

chop + ed = chopped shop + ing = shopping

hot + er = hotter strap + ed = strapped

Do not double the ﬁ nal consonant if the word ends with some other

combination.

VOWEL-VOWEL-CONSONANT VOWEL-CONSONANT-CONSONANT

clean + est = cleanest slick + er = slicker

poor + er = poorer teach + er = teacher

clear + ed = cleared last + ed = lasted

Rule 5. When adding an ending that starts with a vowel to a word

of two or more syllables, double the ﬁ nal consonant only if the

word ends with a consonant-vowel-consonant and the stress is on

the last syllable.

admit + ing = admitting control + er = controller

admit + ed = admitted

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EDITING ESSAYS

666 Part Six • Word Use

Do not double the ﬁ nal consonant in other cases.

problem + atic = problematic offer + ed = offered

understand + ing = understanding

Rule 6. Add s to most words, including words that end in o pre-

ceded by a vowel.

MOST WORDS WORDS THAT END IN VOWEL PLUS O

book + s = books video + s = videos

college + s = colleges stereo + s = stereos

jump + s = jumps radio + s = radios

Add -es to words that end in s, -sh, -ch, or x and o preceded by a

consonant.

WORDS THAT END IN S, -SH, -CH, OR X WORDS THAT END IN CONSONANT PLUS O

class + es = classes potato + es = potatoes

push + es = pushes hero + es = heroes

bench + es = benches go + es = goes

fax + es = faxes

EXCEPTIONS: pianos, solos (and others)

Step 5: Consult a Spelling List

The following is a list of the one hundred most commonly misspelled

words. Consult this as you proofread your writing.

One Hundred Commonly Misspelled Words

absence

achieve

across

aisle

a lot

already

analyze

answer

appetite

argument

athlete

awful

basically

beautiful

beginning

believe

business

calendar

career