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

[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.