English word usage difficulties
Edit to overcome spellchecker errors

English word usage is a catch-all phrase for a combination of grammar and spelling questions that can trip even the most careful writers.

According to researchers Lunsford and Lunsford (2008), between 1988 and 2008 the number of word use errors in college students' writing has soared. The researchers attibute the rise to the students accepting the verdict of their computer spell-check programs without verifying that suggested substitutions are correct.

A glance through the list of common types of English word usage problems will show you why writers have to be on guard against corrrectly spelled wrong words.

Homonyms

Homonyms present one of the most challenging English usage problems, and, because so many homonyms are among the most common English words, they are difficult to avoid.

There are two types of homonyms: homophones and homographs.

Homophones are words that are pronounced the same way but spelled differently because they also have different meanings. For example:

• There, their, they're

• Weather, whether

• Moose, mousse

Homographs are words that are spelled exactly the same way but that are pronounced differently and have different meanings. For example,

• Bow, as in bow and arrow

• Bow, as in take a bow

Pity the poor student who has to figure out the correct words to use when confonted with a passage like this:

Cupid strung his bow, let his arrow fly. It missed Annette, but struck her beau as he was taking a bow.

Wrong words, confused words

Another category of wrong words are neither homophones or homographs, although when sloppily pronounced they can sound similar. This list of confused words includes:

• affect and effect

• brake and break

• conscience and conscious

• desert and dessert

• than and then

• lie and lay

Additional wrong words are often provided by a spell checker's interpretation of a typo or misspelling as the writer's intention. Thus students often write such things as:

• I barley had time to finish.

• I was set designer for an armature theater production.

Helping students to overcome these types of English word usage problems is challenging. You must engage as many of the students' senses as possible to get them to learn the definitions of words that look or sound very much alike. You must also pound into them the importance of checking the spell checker's suggestions against their dictionaries.