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Transcript Hi, Lori here, welcoming you to tips and tools for ESL and EFL learners, from betteratenglish.com. This episode marks our first videocast, so those of you who have video iPods can listen and watch. If you have feedback or questions for us, you can email them to info [AT] BetterAtEnglish [DOT] com or stop by our forum, which you can find at www.betteratenglish.com/forum.

Today’s topic: spelling and spell checkers.

Judging from the email I get from many of my students, it seems as if some of them have a “who cares?” attitude toward spelling in email. Sometimes their spelling is so bad that I can tell right away that they didn’t even bother run a spell checker.

Maybe spelling doesn’t seem important anymore because modern English language teaching often focuses on “successful communication” and “just getting your message across” rather than “boring” details like grammar and spelling. While this may help give learners confidence in their ability to use English to communicate effectively, there is a downside. The covert message is that spelling isn’t important anymore.

Good spelling is still important. Very important.

Yes, even in email. In fact, I’d say that it’s particularly important in email and online. Why? In the world of email and online communication, your spelling and language reflect who you are. If you use sloppy spelling in your online communications, people may not see through it to discover the brilliant, charming person that you are. This is particularly important for first impressions – say, when you’re writing an email to someone for the first time. When people read your email, not only will they be interested in your message; they’ll be trying to form an idea of who you are. And if your email is full of bad spelling, their first impression of you could well be that you are a loser.

Is spelling really such a big deal? It can be. Remember the movie Forrest Gump? Well, writing to someone for the first time is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get. And if you get someone like this, she’ll take one look at your bad spelling and careless mistakes and come to the conclusion that you are stupid (or careless or lazy).

Fortunately, there is some good news. Free tools are available, tools that make bad spelling piece of cake to fix. And they are really easy to use. In fact, it’s so easy to run a spell check these days that there really are no excuses.

Let’s look at some of the free spelling tools available for two of the most popular browsers, IE and Firefox. They will help you check your spelling in everything you write online: email, forums, comments on blogs, even filling in online forms. Of course, no spelling checker can fix ALL of your mistakes, but that’s still no reason NOT to use one. I estimate that using a spelling checker will catch a huge percentage of your errors.

First we’ll look at Internet Explorer, the most widely used browser today. There is a useful spelling and dictionary tool for version 5.0 or higher. It’s a plug-in called IE Spell, and you can download it at www.IEspell.com. Once you’ve installed it, it works in a similar way to the spelling checker in MS Word.

In addition to a spelling checker, IE spell also has a cool dictionary look-up function. When you are reading text online and come across a word you don’t know, you can simply right click on it to look it up in a variety of online dictionaries.

Moving on now to add-ons available for Mozilla Firefox. Now, I have to take a moment to rave about Firefox. Firefox freaking rocks. If you are not using it already, you should be. It is so much better than IE that I don’t even know where to start. You owe it to yourself to at least try it.

Why am I so keen on Firefox? It’s got tons of free language tools and useful add-ons, it’s safer than IE, and it’s not Microsoft.

Some of Firefox’s useful language tools for EFL and ESL learners include a spelling checker for multiple languages – you can switch between languages with the click of a mouse; it’s also got lots of different dictionary look-up plug-ins and translation tools in many languages. The Firefox browser and add-ons are all available for free download at www.mozilla.com.

For those of you who are web savvy, this is probably all you need to know to get started with spell checking in IE or Firefox. If you need more guidance or help downloading or installing these spelling tools, feel free to stop by our forum and ask for help.

Remember, checking your spelling can make a huge difference in how people perceive you in your emails. It only takes a minute to check your spelling, and I promise you, people will think that you rock for doing it.

That’s all for this time. We encourage you to check out our podcast and forum at www.BetterAtEnglish.com where we offer free help for EFL and ESL learners. Bye for now!

Links
IE Spell download page
Firefox download page
Dictionary Search add-on for Firefox)
Multi-language spelling dictionaries for Firefox.

Copyright 2008 L. Linstruth - www.betteratenglish.com.

Tips and tools for EFL and ESL learners: spell checking online (TT-01)

A listener recently emailed offering some constructive criticism about my voice in the Better at English podcasts. I’m always grateful for tips on how we can improve our shows, and I am quite sure that she meant to be helpful. However, because of the language she chose, her critique sounded rather harsh. If I didn’t know how difficult it is to express yourself in a foreign language, I probably would have been offended. Luckily, I DO understand how difficult English can be for EFL and ESL learners, and am thankful for the advice

Being too direct and harsh when giving (constructive) criticism or making requests is a very common problem for the EFL / ESL learners that I teach, so I’ve decided to use this authentic email as a writing contest for you.

TASK
Your task is to rewrite the email below to get the point across more tactfully. Of course your spelling and grammar should be good too. Make it your most beautiful English!

DEADLINE
The deadline for your entries is 00:01 UTC Tuesday 7 August.

HOW TO ENTER
Post your rewritten text as a response to this topic on our forum. (You’ll have to join the forum, but it’s easy. And FREE.) I’ll choose the submission I think is best.

PRIZE
The prize is a 25-Euro gift certificate from Amazon. We had some generous donations to BetterAtEnglish this month, so it’s nice to be able to give something back to our dedicated listeners!

REWRITE THIS

Hi Lori

It would really help me and I’m sure a lot of others like me, if you’d speak with your natural voice, not so high pitched. I was listening to the phrasal verbs on your website ( the episode about spending money) and I was really turned off by your animated speaking.

Good luck!

P.S: I agree with the critique. My delivery in the early “2-minute English” shows SUCKED bigtime

Copyright 2008 L. Linstruth - www.betteratenglish.com.

Better at English writing contest – win an Amazon gift certificate!

Why is it that you only see those pesky, embarrassing typos in important pieces of writing AFTER they’ve gone to press? Like this one from one of my own archives:

…he never fully recovered from the pubic humiliation of having his…

I’ve never fully recovered from that particular "pubic humiliation" either. When you work with words for a living, you really can’t afford to let mistakes like that slip by. And even if writing isn’t your profession, typos can still make you look careless at best, ignorant at worst. Modern spell checkers are useful tools, of course, but they don’t catch everything. My spell checker didn’t save me from the unfortunate "pubic incident" because spell checkers highlight only words that they can’t find in their dictionaries. Pubic is a perfectly good word, just incorrectly wielded in this context. But why didn’t I see it myself?

I didn’t catch the typo myself because my brain, expecting to find the word public, filled in the missing L. Our brains are masters at getting us to see what our experience and expectations tell us we should see. Thus the pubic/public problem wasn’t the only typo that managed to slip by in that text: I tend to flip letters when I type, and there were several instances where I’d typed form instead of from; my brain, doing what brains like to do, had quite merrily transposed the letters back into their correct positions as I proofread because it knew what I had meant to type.You’ve probably already thought of a few things your own fingers tend to fumble over when typing.

Everyone has been guilty of letting a typo slip through at some point, so your ego can probably recover from what are obvious mechanical errors. But what if you happened to let one of the pet peeves of eighth-grade English teachers slip unnoticed into your writing when you’re not looking, unspeakable horrors such as writing loose when you mean lose? Of course you know the difference between loose and lose, but when your deadline is imminent and you’re writing in a last-dash, coffee-fueled frenzy, it’s easy to read right past this kind of slip-up. And there are plenty of uncharitable people in the world who will not see it as a mere slip-up, but rather as a grave indication that you have the intelligence of a turnip. (Note: I am not one of those people!)

So you can’t trust your spell checker or even your own brain when it comes to proofreading your own texts. It sounds like a hopeless case, doesn’t it? Luckily, it’s not. Here are two proofreading methods that can help:

1) Enlist the help of a second reader to help you proofread. It works like this. Your friend slowly and carefully reads aloud from a hard copy while you silently read either the online version or another hard copy. Because the text is new to your friend, her brain is not as likely as you are to fix mistakes as she reads along. Between the two of you, you’ll catch far more errors than you would on your own. You then correct them on the online copy while your friend watches to make sure that you don’t inadvertently add another error. Don’t have a second reader available? Then point 2 is for you.

2) Use text-to-speech software in place of a second reader. You read silently on the hard copy (you’ll catch more errors on a hard copy than you will online) while the text-to-speech software reads the text aloud to you. You will be surprised at how many errors you catch this way, errors that you probably never would have noticed when reading silently to yourself. Mark the changes on the hard copy, and then VERY CAREFULLY enter them into the online copy.

Of course, no method is guaranteed to catch everything. But if you use either text-to-speech software or a second reader, you will have done just about everything you can to minimize the risk of pub(l)ic humiliation because of unfortunate typos. Good luck!

Note: this post is part of a “how to” group writing project over at ProBlogger.net.

Links:
Microsoft reader
http://www.microsoft.com/reader/downloads/pc.asp
Microsoft text-to-speech engine (choose your language)
http://www.microsoft.com/reader/developers/downloads/tts.asp

How To Configure and Use Text-to-Speech in Windows XP (Microsoft Knowledge Base)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306902/

How to automate Excel Text to Speech in another Office program
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287120/

How to configure Text to Speech for Microsoft Word
http://www.gmayor.com/word_text_to_speech.htm (this is the method I use myself)

Free text-to-speech software
http://www.naturalreaders.com/index.htm
http://www.readplease.com/english/downloads/
http://www.wordtalk.org.uk/ (looks good – integrates with MS Word)

For-purchase text-to-speech software
http://www.tanseon.com/products/voicemx.htm (free trial version)
http://www.alivemedia.net/textspeech.htm (free trial version)
http://www.fog-ware.com/products/ispeak.htm (no demo, but looks good)

Copyright 2008 L. Linstruth - www.betteratenglish.com.

Proofread like a pro: how to catch those pesky mistakes your spell checker misses