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.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

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