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In this series of blogs, Writing Woes, I will share with you some amusing insights on the mistakes people inadvertently make when writing, based on my work as a professional tutor and as a writer for Summit University. (You can visit my tutoring website here: https://lynnthetutor.com)

Here we go!

Help! My Page is Too Nar-
row.
We’ve all been there when writing by hand; we’ve written the first three syllables and have two to go, but we’ve run out of paper. We know we should put one of those little dashes on the edge of the line and write the rest of the word over to the left on the line below. Does it matter where that dash goes? Computers solve the problem automatically and correctly for you, so why bother to learn how to do it yourself? Are you ever going to write with a pen again?
Yes, probably you are, and more often than you would expect.
So, how many Rs are there in the word tomorrow?

RULE 1

Hyphenate after vowels and between consonants, never between phonograms*

to-mor-row
Say it silently to yourself, pronouncing both Rs and you got it.
an-ti-dis-es-tab-lish-men-ta-ri-an-ism
See? Easy peasy.
Is there a word you can never remember how to spell? Learn to hyphenate it.

And One More Thing — RULE 2

Now that the concept of speaking in schwas** has been widely accepted, most vowels sound like uh most of the time. So how are you going to learn to spell anything?
Speak in schwas all you want — although I wish you wouldn’t — but when writing, say the words in your head with their proper vowel sounds.

These are the proper vowel sounds:

Vowels as they sound in:
a—at, navy, want
e—end, me
i—in, …ing, silent
o—odd, open, do
u—up, music, put
y—yet, baby, my

So you want to spell probably? You say it, as many do, so it sounds like probuhly, but when you want to write it, you say it silently to yourself:
pro-bab-ly

And presto, with these two rules, you can spell 85% of the words in the English language.

A Personal Plea

There is a much-abused compound word: another.
an + other
It used to be pronounced as an + other.
Now it is pronounced as a + nother — (uh-nother). Please note that nother is not a word.
I beg you to stop saying “a whole nother.” It’s so hard not to laugh.
____________
*Phonogram: Two or more letters that make one sound, for example: dge, ie, ng
**Schwa: In layman terms it is a vowel that is not fully pronounced; usually it ends up sounding like UH.
By Lynn Wilton
From Lynn’s Medium Account.

Lynn The Tutor
(My tutoring website: https://lynnthetutor.com)