Yes, you can usually get along just fine in life even if the only language you know is English. However, scientists are now confirming that bilingualism has a wide range of benefits – and that these benefits are not just related to communication skills.

Quality Job Prospects

Knowing an in-demand second language like French, German, Spanish, or Mandarin will give you a wide range of better job prospects to choose from. If you’re not from an English-speaking country and English is not your native language, it’s a good idea to choose that language first, as it’s widely used in many global corporations.

You can work at a multinational company and relocate at a moment’s notice to idyllic, exotic urban cities in Japan and Singapore or the West Coast in the US (depending where you’re coming from).

Bilingual employees are often preferred over workers with more technical skills, simply because they already have an advantage: they can instantly communicate and focus on implementing marketing strategies overseas without any linguistic barriers. In general, it’s quicker and easier to learn new technical skills that it is to learn a new language.

Stronger Memory

A less cited benefit of being bilingual is the strong, fit memory you get to enjoy. Since learning a new language mainly consists of memorizing spelling, vocabulary and syntax rules, it helps people improve their memory capacity and flexibility. A university of Brunswick, Canada study showed that bilingual individuals are better at remembering shopping lists and directions than monolingual people.

Shield Against Alzheimer’s and Dementia

A study on the importance of bilingualism confirms that people speaking regularly in a language other than their native language tend to experience the first cognitive decline symptoms associated with dementia about 4-5 years later than people who are monolingual. The mean age for dementia’s first signs for monolingual people is 71.4 while for bilingual individuals the average onset is at 75.5 years.

Improved Brain Functionality

When we learn a second language our brain is forced to process, adapt, and use different communication systems. This brain flexibility and adaptability are competencies you can apply in several problem-solving contexts even if they have nothing to do with language use.

Multitasking and Brain Agility

If you’ve ever talked with a bilingual person or are one yourself, you know that the switch between languages — sometimes within the same sentence – is ongoing. Using languages of different structures, vocabulary, and pronunciation rules shows that a person is skillful in both and agile enough to seamlessly juggle them at a moment’s notice.

Knowing a second language will come in handy when you travel abroad, and it does make you look more skilled and professional when listed in your resume, but the mental benefits of being bilingual have long-term advantages that go above and beyond these daily uses.

From a stronger brain and better thinking agility, to improving your conversational adeptness in your native tongue, it is evident that being a polyglot should be the norm.

Cross-posted on the Wordela blog.

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Next time you’re bored out of your mind, don’t reach for your smartphone, reach for a book instead. Reading books provides a range of benefits you may not be aware of. In fact, the more books you
read, the more awesome you will be.

Reading makes you (more) empathetic

Reading fiction gives you an inside peek into scenarios and realities you couldn’t otherwise live yourself. This opens up your critical thinking capabilities and activates your empathy sensors. You become more aware and sensitive to people’s plights, cultures, and customs, and feel more forgiving and nurturing where you might have once been condescending or inflexible.

Reading is an immersive experience

A good novel will have you questioning reality. A good novel will drag you so deeply into its plot that your identification with the protagonist will be mind-blowing and reality-blurring. Enough said.

Reading is knowledge

You can watch a documentary or tutorial to learn a new skill but nothing beats the original experience of reading, processing, and understanding new knowledge or how-tos all by yourself.

Reading is a bottomless chest from which you will always be able to get a few jewels — with each book and each tale.

Reading is traveling for your soul

Reading helps you leave all your workaday troubles behind, even if for a short moment. It empties your mind until you’re powerful enough to confront your daily demons.

Reading is entertainment

For the bibliophiles out there, reading is a matchless experience. Reading gives you immense joy. It engages your senses and enthralls your mind with scenery, plots, and mind-blowing images.

Reading makes you interesting

From learning smart, little-known facts, to initiating great discussions with friends, reading makes you a knowledgeable, interesting person people will love to hang out with.

Reading is inspiration

Reading stimulates your creativity. You start thinking critically and more boldly, all because you’ve already been exposed to various scenarios and have garnered the tools and knowledge to be less ordinary and more unique.

Reading is growth

Even if you don’t read a self-improvement book per se, virtually any well-written book will help you become a better person. From building your self-esteem to becoming better at decision-making, books give you the tools to cope with life’s conundrums — and the ever-important Zombie apocalypse.

Reading is power

It’s a cliché but it’s nonetheless true: reading empowers you. The knowledge and worlds you experience when reading give you confidence and wisdom on how to deal with real life situations more gracefully and wisely.

Reading is your key to becoming a better person in all aspects of your life

Reading is how you improve your marketability, your communication skills, your empathy and emotional intelligence, your appeal — and even your sexiness. Reading is one of the few habits known to man that you can never have too much of. So go on, read on!

Bonus benefit

If you speed read you get to reap all these benefits in a shorter time. Awesome, right?

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You may already know that the word “pants” means something else entirely in British English (hint: it doesn’t mean “trousers”), but do you know about the words that both British and American English speakers use, yet spell differently?

A basic rule of the thumb that covers these words is that American English spelling tends to be simplified and pronunciation-based. While British English favors the spelling of words as they originally appeared in the language they’ve been borrowed from – for instance, the word “cheque” – American English spellers generally write the word as they sound it out: “check.”

Writers, exchange students, and businessmen and businesswomen need to be aware of these spelling differences when dealing with people in Britain and the US, because using the proper spelling for each country helps avoid confusion, and also lends that touch of professionalism that marks a true global citizen.

Here are the main spelling differences between American and British spelling of English words.

-er/re

Words that end in –re in Britain often have those two letters reversed when spelled in American English. Here are some examples:

British English

centre, fibre, litre, theatre

American English

center, fiber, liter, theater

-nse/nce

While the British use the –nce ending, Americans generally prefer –nse.

American English

defense, license, offense, pretense

British English

defence, licence, offence, pretence

-ize/ise

American English uses the –ize spelling at the end of words, and while some people in Britain accept that as a valid spelling, you’ll usually see those same words spelled with the  –ise ending instead.

British English

apologise, organise, recognise

American English

apologize, organize, recognize

-or/-our

In British English, the preferred spelling of words ending in –our is not maintained in American English; in the United States, the “u” is dropped from the word.

American English

behavior, color, humor, labor, neighbor, flavor

British English

behaviour, colour, humour, labour, neighbour, flavour

Double vowels “ae” and “oe”

While the British retain the more complex spelling of words with Greek or Latin roots, using the orthodox spelling that was established when those words were brought into the English language as far back as the 14th and 15th centuries, the Americans, as usual, like their terminology simplified.

American English

leukemia

maneuver

estrogen

pediatric

British English

leukaemia

manoeuvre

oestrogen

paediatric

Words ending in a vowel plus –l

While Americans have dropped the double “l” when adding suffixes to verbs that end in the letter “l” the British still generally use the two-“l” approach to their spelling.

American English

traveling

traveled

traveler

fueled

fueling

British English

travelling

travelled

traveller

fuelled

fuelling

The rules can be confusing, especially for people who are learning English as a second language. Which system you choose often depends on where you’re learning English. Obviously, if you’re learning English in the United States, you will be taught that orthography, but if you are learning English in India, you will generally be taught the British spelling. Wherever you are, keep in mind that more often than not, the American spelling of words is a simplified version that is closer to how a word sounds rather how it was spelled in the language it has been borrowed from.

Knowing the spelling rules and differences will help you learn the spelling exceptions, too. For instance, archaeology is a spelling that’s used by English teachers and scientists in both American and British universities. Keep digging around, and you’ll find more exceptions – and that’s a hard and fast rule.

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We’re coming across this topic frequently in news articles, and it’s the subject of many online debates. Is handwriting about to be declared dead, and a useless skill? Is touch typing the future – and only – way of communicating non-verbally?

Teachers, parents, and students are all wondering if learning cursive is relevant in a tech-driven world. This gives rise to a more pressing question: what should students learn first, touch typing or handwriting?

Current changes in education are giving precedence to touch typing and effectively moving handwriting skills to the backseat. Is this wrong, or should it be called smart adaptability? Students are now expected to use their keyboards to do research, complete assignments, and take exams – and this leaves handwriting instruction behind. Justifiably, students need to learn how to touch type in order to effectively handle their school homework and in-class assignments. Touch typing is the future. As gadgets and technologies make their way into the classroom, it’s only natural that schools want to prioritize keyboarding skills over handwriting.

However, this doesn’t mean we should rule out handwriting altogether. Handwriting is a deeply complex motor skill that’s cognitively challenging and essential to master. Handwriting involves several brain faculties at once, including sensory, motor, and language centers of the brain, and of course our senses of hearing and sight and touch. Considering the Common Core standards — that the majority of U.S states have adopted — students need to be proficient touch typists by the time they complete the 3rd grade.

This of course means that students need to formally learn how to touch type in class. This doesn’t indicate, however, that it should entirely replace handwriting instruction. The two are equally essential skills. No matter how pervasive text-language and keyboard-based devices will become in the next 20 years, handwriting will still be required for things like signatures, paying by check, writing thank you notes, and jotting down grocery lists. And of course, there’s the possibility of being creative and expressive through cursive writing.

Yes, the “for handwriting” argument is one that is generally imbued with nostalgia, and for some people even a fear of something so familiar going out of popularity.

It could also be that the rise of tablet use could mean that not even physical keyboards will survive the obsession with touch-screen devices, but isn’t handwriting a uniquely human skill? Given that, it’s not something we should let go extinct.

Writing skills, including cursive writing, are part and parcel of language acquisition and mastery. Perhaps our brains are agile enough to adapt to a new channel of language learning where writing is replaced with touch typing, but then would people be able to read cursive or sign a legal contract if they’ve never written using pen and paper before? It’s obvious that at least for the foreseeable future, handwriting is here to stay.

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We take selfies while we commute to work, and talk with people on Tinder.

Imagine that you’ve traveled in time, and you’re talking to someone back in the 1930s. Imagine saying to them, “I’ll teach you how to surf the web, post updates on other people’s walls, and change your status every hour.” No matter how knowledgeable that person was in 1930s technology, they would definitely be confused. A “web” was something a spider built. A “wall” was only built of brick and mortar. “Status” meant the social class you belonged to, or earned.

Technology and the fast-growing culture we are all part of has changed more than just our habits and lifestyles. It has changed our language as well. Words take up new meanings. New words are created from scratch to give meaning to new concepts, technologies, and realities. It’s a crazy, crazy world we live in.

Tinder

Tinder use to mean firelighter; any dry, inflammable material people use to light a fire. Today, it’s the well-known match-making app that people use to light romantic fires.

Web

It used to refer to a spider’s web, but now it’s the daily reality for many workers, students, and people in general.

The word used to bring to mind things you’d find in abandoned homes or brush aside during long evening walks in the woods, but now it’s a virtual world in which you work, talk, and entertain yourself.

Surf

Sporty people surf at the beach or ride the waves on a surfboard, but today, surfing is also the activity of sitting or lying on your back and surfing the world wide web — not much of an outdoorsy activity, really.

Mouse

Mice were once pests in your kitchen. Today, mice are found everywhere and are no longer pesky. Today’s mouse is a device you use to move a cursor on a screen and click on links. We used to try and trap mice, now the tables seem to have been turned.

Application

You apply for college or a job, but forty years ago you would never have thought you would download and install applications on devices to play games, educate yourself, listen to music, or book your flight tickets. The times they are a-changin’.

Traffic

Traffic jams, road rage, and a boss calling to ask for your whereabouts, that sounds hellish. Modern day traffic is not that bad, though. In fact, online traffic is desirable, because it shows your business website gets visitors and clicks and people are interested in what you sell. Kudos to you!

Tweets

Tweets used to be bird songs that could be as long and intricate as the songbird wanted. Now we’re chirping to each other on our smartphones.

The web is a lively hub for neologisms and creative new applications of existing concepts. No one would have predicted that when we were talking about apples and blackberries we weren’t referring to fruit but smartphones. Nor did we ever imagine we would virtually check in to places we visit, and accept cookies instead of eating them. When you’re aware of all of the new ways words are used, you can devour the virtual world.

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Scientists recently looked into the brain activity of people caught up in reading a page-turner, J. K. Rowling’s popular “Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone.” The experiment helped measure brain activity during reading, and it is shedding light on the questions surrounding how our brains work, how they make sense of reality, and what they experience when we read.

The eight subjects that participated in the Carnegie Mellon University were reading the ninth chapter of the first Harry Potter book, one that revolves around a flying lesson.

What scientists discovered is that when the participants were reading about the movements and efforts of Harry Potter to ride his broom and fly, this activated the brain regions that people use when they try to detect and understand other people’s movements. In other words, reading and interpreting real-life events activate the same brain regions.

The flying lesson chapter the participants were asked to read was also one laden with emotions. In this chapter, Harry is confronted with the bully Malfoy and at one point meets a three-headed dog. The many events and emotions described in this chapter helped scientists extract some important conclusions from the study.

The scientists discovered that during the reading experiment, when people were reading about a person’s point of view or character, the brain region that lit up was the one associated with how people interpret other people’s actions. As the scientists explain, “Similarly, the characters in the story are associated with activation in the same brain region we use to process other people’s intentions.” Source

This reveals that what we read truly engages our brain and activates complex processes so that we can understand  what we’re reading, both in terms of language and in terms of narrative.

In other words, whether we’re reading about how a protagonist tries to decipher a person’s actions by trying to figure out what their intentions are, or whether we are trying to decipher these intentions in a person sitting next to us, the same brain regions come into play.

While previous studies focused on individual words and sentences to understand how the brain processes language, by looking at language and brain activity through the act of reading, we get a much richer overview of how the brain responds to this complex process. The reader is expected to decipher the meaning of words and put this meaning in context. The reader needs to use grammar and context clues, and at the same time keep up with how the characters develop and how the plot proceeds through the various events introduced in the narrative.

This research is a big step towards better understanding of how the brain operates and processes visual and linguistic stimuli, and how reading affects our brain. It’s not the first time that scientists have used reading as the vehicle for monitoring brain activity. Reading is a cognitively complex process that seems to hold the key to many of our brain’s mysteries — mysteries that, as yet, are still unsolved.

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It seems that everyone is in a constant frenzied pursuit of more happiness, more money, more skills, more power. This pursuit doesn’t have to be entirely random and chaotic, though. You can achieve all these things if you can prioritize wisely. For instance, you cannot earn more money if you lack the necessary tech skills to succeed in the modern marketplace, and you cannot find everlasting happiness unless you engage in some self-reflection and life evaluation first.

If you combine new and modern skills with tried-and-true wisdom, you will be able to prepare yourself for a brighter future.

Leadership

Leadership is an umbrella term for being an assertive, resourceful, and confident individual. A leader is someone who’s bold enough to take risks, and yet wise enough to take these risks only at the most appropriate times.

Leadership is an attribute that will make you stand out and help you achieve more in life.

Emotional Intelligence

While our school curriculum focuses on teaching us math, science, languages and other skills, what classes are we taking that nurture and grow our emotional intelligence?

Emotional intelligence is more than a fancy, trendy term. It’s an ability that’s essential in our homes, our offices, our societies, and our schools.

Emotional intelligence is an increased empathy, sensitivity, and awareness of your own feelings, moods, and attitude – as well as those of others. Emotional intelligence helps you make the most out of your personal potential, and also avoid interpersonal crises while nurturing a benevolent overall culture in all possible contexts.

Time Management

Time management is an essential skill. In fact, time management is the alpha and the omega when it comes to conquering goal after goal. With good time management comes better organizational skills, and the two combined ensure you can reach your goals in a time-efficient, impressive fashion.

Teamwork

In the world of digital collaboration, massive open online courses, and Ed Tech, it’s obvious that without basic teamwork you cannot achieve everything you want. In fact, you will achieve more if you don’t always work alone. Studies are now focusing on the fact that solitary work habits cannot compete with the results and side benefits of collaboration.

Cultivate your teamwork skills and you will realize the true power of collaborative thinking and acting at your job, in your home, and with your family and friends.

Tech Skills

Innate and learned skills will only get you so far if they don’t relate to today’s modern lifestyle. Our world is a tech-driven one, and if you are not adept at using new technologies, chances are you’re going to be left behind.

While you watch other people speed read and touch type their way to success, you will be struggling with slow-paced skills and outdated keyboarding techniques. The only way forward is by being time-efficient at everything you do.

Speed Reading

Since the digital content revolution, the amount of new knowledge syndicated every minute grows nonstop. This has made many people anxious and overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content they must handle every day in order to keep themselves up to date with new developments.

That’s where speed reading comes in. With speed reading, you can read efficiently and always be in the know. If knowledge is power, with speed reading you become invincible.

Touch Typing

Another time-based skill is keyboarding. With work, entertainment, and communication being mostly done through computer monitors and touch screens, it’s only reasonable to want to improve your touch typing skills and make the most out of your time every day.

Digital Literacy

Educational platforms, mobile apps, the Cloud, online research, blogging and coding. The list of tech skills we are expected to at least be aware of is continually growing.

While it’s probably not realistic to try to master all possible tech skills, having a general idea as to the most popular and essential ones will ensure you can keep up with the rest of the competition and make certain your lack of digital literacy doesn’t stand in the way of your aspirations.

It’s true that “business skills” is a vague concept simply because it encompasses so many varied and often contradictory qualifications. Some insist that essential business skills are leadership and organization, while others point out more human-centric ones such as kindness and empathy— always depending of course on what kind of business we’re talking about in terms of size, niche, and mission.

Nonetheless, there are certain timeless business skills that can leverage any company’s success. The diversity of business skills mentioned below might seem daunting or even impossible for a single person, but through persistent effort, any skill can be mastered.

Business Management

Finance Management

A business’ sole reason for existence is profit, so it’s essential to be able to financially monitor your business so that the right choices will lead to sales and profit increases. Basic financial concepts, software, and strategic business approaches are necessary in building a solid basis for your business.

Human Resources Management

Business management is about efficiently taking care of your employees. This includes:

• providing them incentives and adequate training to keep them up with the latest developments,

• providing a fruitful, non-threatening environment to work in

• ensuring your employees are at all times satisfied with their work environment and invested in the success of your business

Vision Plus Passion

These two could easily be labeled personality traits, but we feel they’re learnable skills. Having passion and vision allows anyone to succeed; these are qualities that drive innovation, creativity, and success no matter your niche or product. Vision is what will get you ahead of the competition and onto the right route; passion is what will keep you motivated enough to keep trying until you achieve your company’s goals.

Adaptability

The times when sticking to insufficient patterns and approaches are long behind us. Today’s business models are about flexibility and swift adaptability to new conditions. Strategies might be efficient but they’re never 100% under your control, because there are circumstances that will affect your business that are beyond your reach. The sooner you can acknowledge their irreversibility and try to adapt to these changes, the smaller the loss for you.

Strategic Planning and Decision Making

It ultimately boils down to making all the right choices. It’s about critically and thoroughly exhausting all possibilities to arrive at the desired end-point fast, unharmed, stronger than before. Strategic planning and decision making are two aspect of business management you will be confronted with, day in and day out. The more proficient you are in the techniques and approaches available to you, the better the choices you’ll make.

Trusting Others

People with start-ups often have this irrational urge to have everything under their own personal control. But as a business grows and gathers more opportunities for expansion, the efficiency with which a business can be managed by one person drops dramatically.

You see, it’s a skill to acknowledge your own limitations, to admit that you cannot control everything and everyone, and that sometimes it’s okay to delegate some tasks to other people. Trust doesn’t stop here, however. It’s not enough to be willing to assign tasks to people, it’s also about choosing the most competent person for each task. Now that’s a challenge.

Networking and Marketing Skills

Marketing Strategies

Increasing sales can be achieved with strategic marketing campaigns. Freebies, sweepstakes, and contests can gain your brand visibility and encourage people to talk about your business. Promoting your products/services to new audiences and focusing on target groups you may have previously thought of as irrelevant is a skill you ought to acquire if you wish to have constant (though sometimes gradual) growth.

Establishing Lasting Relationships

Good connections with existing customers increase loyalty and return customer numbers. Customer loyalty doesn’t just happen – it requires perseverance on your part to keep your customers engaged, interested, and willing to return to your doorstep, virtual or physical. Social media marketing is becoming ubiquitous and it’s certainly a skill that is easily learned but capable of increasing engagement and driving sales.

Becoming An Industry-Leading Company

Yes, even this is a skill: the skill to identify new trends or paradigm shifts early on, before your competition, and ease into an industry change smoothly and loss-free.

Other Business Management Skills

Bravery

It all boils down to being brave. If you’re brave you will find the courage to be honest with an under-performing employee, or have the power to acknowledge your own mistakes rather than ignoring them.

Speed Reading

In order to keep up with all the news and developments in your field and beyond, you must have speed reading skills, otherwise you’ll be lost in a sea of information. If you’re a slow reader, research can actually be a counterproductive process, taking away valuable time and providing you with only marginal benefits and little new knowledge. Speed reading software is a powerful tool that can increase your reading speed, helping you to always be on top of what’s happening and what you can do to implement new strategies.

Time Management

As illustrated by the reading skills issue discussed above, time is an ever-present limitation for any business. Time management is a must-have tool, helping you efficiently organize your time and energy, prioritize the most significant tasks, and deliver to the best of your power.

Wordela is finally here! The long-anticipated 2015 release comes with compelling new features and functionality to make learning new vocabulary even more fun.

eReflect is known for making the learning process both pleasant and easy, something that’s even more apparent in this latest release. Ultimate Vocabulary™ 2015 is available in two versions: the Home Edition, and the new EDU edition, specially designed for schools and other educational organizations. Both are introducing new state-of-the-art features. The first is the most obvious – it’s all in the Cloud.

Cloud-based

What makes software instantly user-friendly is the ability to be there when you want it, and to not give you a hard time during installation and later practice sessions. eReflect has made sure that all of these problems have been solved before they even start.

Wordela is completely cloud-based. In other words, it is a subscription-based service you can get access to for vocabulary practice anywhere, any time, on (almost) any device.

Read Here For More Review

Learning and Social Sharing

Nothing makes learning more fun than being able to share your accomplishments and your feelings of success with your friends and family. eReflect has made it possible for you to easily share your vocabulary improvement milestones directly from the software. You can now share your progress on Facebook and even practice together with fellow users and friends to make your vocabulary building routine fun and competitive.

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Wordela EDU: Classroom-tailored

This version of the popular vocabulary builder is an essential component for any English class, especially for ESL students. Ultimate Vocabulary™ can be used in classrooms of any size as well as in one-to-one private lessons. It’s flexible, structured, and customizable enough to cater to every student’s needs and learning goals. Tailored for school environments and meeting the demands of modern-day teachers, Ultimate Vocabulary™ EDU is:

►Easy to Manage

Your students all get personal accounts which track their practice and progress. They also receive vocabulary building recommendations on what to practice with next.

►Insightful Reporting

With Ultimate Vocabulary EDU you have a bird’s eye view of your students’ progress and any weaknesses so you can better fine-tune their subsequent practice.

►Curriculum Compatible

What’s noteworthy about the EDU version is that as a teacher you don’t need to worry about teaching your students the right words. It’s compatible with curricula in the US, the UK, Australia, and many other English-speaking countries for easy, smooth integration in your classroom. This means little if any lesson planning will be required of you.

►Collaborative Class Learning

With Ultimate Vocabulary EDU you can get your students to practice individually but still be following the same word list, thanks to the system’s Class Word Lists feature. This means you can get a clear idea of their progress and see what improvements you can make to optimize the learning efficiency of every student.

►Customizable

One of the system’s most prominent features is its ability to meet every student’s learning needs. If a student knows a word on a list, they can move onto the next one without wasting time. This ensures each student follows their own learning pace and maximize their learning with tailored activities.

►Universal Compatibility

Lastly, Ultimate Vocabulary EDU will seamlessly function on any network, platform, educational lab, and personal device, which provides multiple learning opportunities. Your students can practice at home, you can teach vocabulary in one-to-one tutoring sessions, and you can supervise classroom instruction to many students at once, all through your school’s network.

Wordela is currently being used by tens of thousands of happy customers in over 110 countries.

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Unless you’re a ferociously passionate language user, chances are you’ve used a similar sounding word instead of the appropriate one, and more than once. How many times in the last week did  your Word editor flagged your errors when you confused “its” and “it’s” or “their” and “there”? Worse, what if your computer editor didn’t catch them at all?

What is a homophone?

A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same way as another word, but has a different meaning. This means that words like “to”, “two”, and “too” are homophones. We pronounce them the same, yet their meanings are completely different.

It’s not just simple words that get confused. The words “queue” and “cue” have a different spelling and meaning, but they too can be confused when you’re touch typing quickly and you’re already deep into your post-snack afternoon slump.

Why so much hate on homophones?

The English language has borrowed words from so many languages and cultures that it has become a very confusing and often unpredictable language to learn. “Tea” and “tee” are semantically different, but it’s unbelievably easy to swap one for the other in writing.

This is why people can get upset when homophones cause them problems. Homophones are little language bandits that steal away your thunder. Your writing will never be flawless because they’re bound to ruin it, you think. The thing is they’re embarrassingly good at it – but you can be better.

How to master homophone usage

The only foolproof solution to ban homophone misuse from your writing once and for all is to improve your writing skills.

Homophones, as we said above, are little bandits that wait for exhaustion to kick in to make their move and sneak into your writing. This means the best thing you can do is to equip yourself with the linguistic knowledge you  need to avoid them, or at least spot them when they creep in.

• Revisit your elementary school years and practice your spelling and vocabulary skills. There’s no shame in trying to become a competent language user, no matter how old you are.

• When learning new words, ensure you master both their spelling and their meaning.

• It’s not enough to know how a word is pronounced, because chances are you’re going to confuse “keys” with “quays” at some point.

• By properly learning a word’s orthography and meaning you are instantly minimizing the chances of confusing homophones in your writing. This will ensure that you avoid the always-awkward situation of having to explain yourself to your editor or manager. Yikes.

• Practice your language skills with spelling games and even with spelling software. Good software will help you brush up on your language skills and give you a the tools you need to write clearly and proofread your writing afterward. Remember, “Ceiling the deal” is not an acceptable phrase any way you look at it.

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