Three Spelling Rules We All Learned Once

Becoming overly dependent on spell check provoked a revitalized interest in those spelling rules we all learned as children.  There are ten major ones, and this post will explore (I mean review) three of them.   Forgive the elementary nature of this blog post and please indulge my fascination with words, regardless of length, and the English language.


Rule #1
One of the first rules we all learn in the early years of school is to put “i” before “e” except after “c” … and sometimes after “w”.

achieve	ceiling	weird
believe	conceited	weight
chief	receive	weir
grief	receipt	weigh
piece	conceive	weightless
niece	perceive	weighty

Next, we learned that we could not trust this rule to apply in every instance and were taught how much of the English we know and love is populated with words that are exceptions to a given rule.

“e” before “i” and not after “c”	“i” before “e” even after “c”
either	species
leisure	financier
neither	fancier
freight	specie

Rule #2

When a word ends with an "e" this last vowel remains silent and causes the other vowel in the word to have a long sound or "say its name" as my elementary teachers used to say.  Then we were often presented with a table similar to the one below so that we had the visual on this rule:  short vowel sound vs. long vowel sound.  After all, we learned and applied more phonics rules than kids do today.

Short vowel sound	Long vowel sound
hat	hate
mat	mate
hop	hope
fat	fate
mad	made
sit	site (as in a location)
hid	hide

Rule #3

I've seen adults still thrown by this one and even some college graduates I've worked with do not properly double the consonants when adding a suffix to one-syllable words.  That is the third rule, to know when to add an extra consonant at the end. Maybe this rule isn't taught in second and third grades anymore...

One-syllable word	Proper spelling with added ending
bat	batted, batting
hop	hopped, hopping
plan	planned, planning
scrap	scrapped, scrapping
stop	stopped, stopping
bar	barred, barring
mar	marred, marring
pat	patted, patting
map	mapped, mapping
nap	napped, napping
snap	snapped, snapping
whip	whipped, whipping
top	topped, topping
tip	tipped, tipping
tap	tapped, tapping

Please share this with a grade school student you know, or have them add to it, or just accept my post as a exercise in nostalgia. Ah, remembering all those wonderful moments, effectively glued to a small desk, staring at the blackboard while rules were tossed out for us to catch and remember. I'm glad I still love English after going through those drills!