Last week, I reposted an old blog post from my old dyslexia blog as temporary resurrection of the Friday = dyslexia day feature of this blog. In the post that I re-posted last Friday there was a link to The Dyslexic’s Guild to Spell Check. After that re-post, I realized I have never reposted The Dyslexic’s Guild to Spell Check here. And I’ve got to be honest, I think it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever written. Although the humor is only in the fact that I still do this ALL THE TIME.
So without further ado, her is The Dyslexic’s Guild to Spell Check, originally posted
here on February 1, 2009.
I'm not using spell check in this blog - which is making my life oh so easy. But in most situations, I do attempt to correct my creative spelling before unleashing it on the world. This isn't always an easy thing to do. I have developed an integrated stratagy for spell checking that I will explain to you now. If you too are a piss poor speller, feel free to implement these stratagies at will.
1. Right click on all the words that MS WORD underlines in read.
2. If the correct spelling is listed give yourself a pat on the back for being so close.
3. If only one word is listed take the time to carefully sound it out and make sure it is the correct word. Selecting the wrong word from spell check can be wors than leaving in a misspelled word.
4. When you get that nasty "no suggestions" response, begin by analysing your consinets.
5. If there is a place where a single consinent could be doubled or an f could be replaced with a ph, try that first.
6. If after two or three tries of shifting up consinents you still don't have a useful suggestions, return to your orriginal consinents and begin alternating vowels.
7. If you are a reformed dyslexic who was subjected to many years of intensive phonics training you should know that the sound ē can be spelled e, e-consinent-e, ee, ea, y, ie, i, or ey. Most vowel sounds have at least five possible spellings. Shift through alternative vowel spellings until word gives you a useful suggestion.
8. When word fails you and you can't think of any more possible spelling options move onto google. Type a common phrase using the word into google and see if it gives you the "did you mean..." suggestions.
9. When word and google both fail you, move onto the thesarus. Look up a synonim for the word you are attempting to spell in the thesarus and hope it lists the word you want in the list of synonims.
10. If you still don't know how to spell your intended word - just put in the synonim and move on.
So there you have it. After going though all those easy steps, 99% of the time you should have correct spelling. Normally the misspelling creaps in when step 3 isn't properly followed.
I’m going to go with the fictional character instead of the author for my answer and pick Isabel from Laurie Halse Anderson’s Chains series. There are a lot of books about slavery as it relates to the civil war, but Chains is the first book I’ve ever seen to deal with slavery during the revolutionary war. Isabel is an intelligent young slave living in New York during the 1790’s.
