| | | No excuse spelling list |
My high school circulated a "no excuse" spelling list. Misspelling a "no excuse" word in any assignment caused an automatic reduction of one letter grade on the assignment.
Here are some examples of spelling and punctuation blunders often committed by people who should know better. Don't be caught yourself!
The first vowel is E, but the second vowel is A, not E. The mnemonic is that to separate is to divide into parts.
Writers whose native language is not English sometimes feel a compulsion to put a spurious S between the B and the T, perhaps in analogy with the French word soustraction. That spelling is attested by the definitive Oxford English Dictionary, but with the remark: "Now illiterate."
The word "principle" is always a noun and means a fundamental tenet, law, rule, or doctrine. As a noun, the word "principal" means the director of a school, but more commonly the word is encountered as an adjective meaning chief, main, or foremost. Thus, we have the "principle of least action" and "Cavalieri's principle", but the "principal value of a singular integral" and the "principal branch of the logarithm".
Normally, an apostrophe indicates possession, as in "Gauss's law". However, no apostrophe is used in the possessive forms of the pronouns it, her, their, our, and your. Thus "it's" can only be the contraction of the phrase "it is". Since contractions are little used in formal writing, you will rarely have occasion to use the form "it's". Unfortunately, it's a sad truth that many people fail to put the apostrophe in its proper place.
The word "affect" is almost always a verb, while "effect" is usually a noun. Here is an example: "Prolonged study of mathematics affects the mind; the effect can be profound." Occasionally, the word "effect" does service as a verb meaning "to produce an effect", as in "to effect a change". The word "affect" is used as a noun only in psychology, where it is a technical term referring to emotional response.
The Math 696 course
pages were last modified April 5, 2005. | | | No excuse spelling list |