orthographic grump

[ritaxis]

There does not seem to be any comprehensible or halfway consistent rule about which final rs or ls get doubled when adding ed or ing.

If I ever had a full list memorized, it is lost now, and I find I must use a spellcheck and hope for the best.

I've been composing lj posts about my work every day but then I forget to actually write and post them. But I am working on the novel: just not at the computer. For some reason I am doing my best work on it in my bedside notebook, which is not the usual way I work. It's not hard to write a thousand words of it this way before I get up in the morning.

Comments

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a Brit, not doubling the Ls when adding ING looks deeply weird to me. Travelling not traveling etc. In fact I want to pronounce traveling as tra-vee-ling or maybe tra-vey-ling because it's the double L that keeps the E short as far as I'm concerned.

I haven't got the hang of American spelling rules at all in this regard. I'd be interested to know what they are - if indeed there are rules and it's not just a haphazard thing.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

When I was in third grade we had a wonderful spelling workbook. With every week's lesson was a little story using the words and often discussing spelling issues. The story I remember best was two children arguing about that very word. The upshot was that they looked in the dictionary and their teacher confirmed that "travelling " and "traveling" were both correct. I believe that the book suggested that the single l was slightly preferred.

I'm left completely at a loss. I would prefer to double all of them, but some of the words appear to be strongly preferred without doubling (I can't think of which ones right now, which is of course why I'm complaining!) and it just makes me wish I was fluent enough in Spanish to write in it.

However, there are nuances in English I would always miss in Spanish, though it has plenty of its own nuances, some of which I would never learn to manipulate.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I read a lot of American SF and fantasy fiction and nearly always traveling is used in preference to travelling. It's definitely 'travelling' in the UK and that's my comfort zone.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Double consonants are the thing I'm consistently wrong about in spelling. I heart spellcheck-as-you-type in Firefox.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

It says something, doesn't it, that this process is so intimidating that we get it wrong more than half the time?

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I haven't studied my mistakes systematically, but so far in this message I haven't gotten anything wrong the first time, or had to stop and think about it. So I think it's nowhere near "more than half the time"; it's more like selective attention highlighting the errors.

Okay, made that whole paragraph without a spelling error, and there are a bunch of single/double consonant decisions to make.

It's not exactly that I'm terribly bad at it; it's that nearly all my spelling errors come from that source. I'm not a champion or copy-editor level speller, but I'm fairly good; except for that one thing.

I don't think of any of the spelling questions as "rules", though, except "i before e except when it isn't". I just know some of the cases back in the hind-brain.