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Writing: Checking for Spelling
Writing: Checking for Spelling Revision
What Does Spelling Mean?
Spelling is the act of placing letters in the right order to form words.
To earn the top marks in your exam, the mark scheme requires you to have a ‘High level of accuracy in spelling, including ambitious vocabulary’ for Level 4 and ‘Generally accurate spelling, including complex and irregular words‘ for Level 3.
Correct spelling makes your writing clearer and stops a lack of clarity in what you are trying to communicate from impacting your grade.
Things to Remember…
Practice spelling the words that you find particularly difficult before the exam.
This can be through flashcards, a spelling test with friends, or repeated writing of the word- use any method that works for you!
Complex words like ‘necessary‘ or ‘occasionally‘ and words with double letters for example can be tricky, so pay close attention to words you find harder in your revision.
Mnemonic devices can be a helpful tool to remember tricky spellings, usually in the form of a pattern, rhyme or even a made-up acronym.
For example:
‘Always smell a rat when you spell separate’
Reading a range of texts can help you recognise and spell complex or sophisticated language in your own work.
For your non-fiction revision, you could read leaflets, magazines and newspaper articles to get an idea of the range of language you could come across in your exam.
How to Check for Spelling
Leave 5 minutes at the end of your answer to read back through your work carefully.
Read through your answer thoroughly as if someone else wrote it, and consider your first impression: does it seem make sense?
Double check any complex or sophisticated words you have used, it can be helpful to write them out once or twice on a piece of scrap paper or near your plan to make sure you have the correct spelling in your answer.
Check out our SPaG page for some homophone examples, have you made the right word choice throughout?
Have you spelled them correctly?
Spelling counts towards 20% of the marks of each specification for any paper, so it’s important to check your work!
It’s a key part of AO6 in your writing question, as it makes up 16 of all of the available marks.
Common Mistakes
Double letter words:
Necessary
A good way to remember this is to think of a t-shirt, a necessary item, which has one collar and two sleeves.
Homophones:
Accept and Except
Accept is a verb meaning to receive.
For example:
‘I accept your gracious offering’.
Except is a preposition, which can mean ‘but’, ‘not including’, ‘other than’.
For example:
‘I would go to the show except I have to work’.
Were, Where and We’re
‘Were’ is the second person past tense of ‘to be’.
For example:
‘Were you at the shop yesterday?
‘Where’ is an adverb indicating a location or situation.
For example:
‘Where did I leave my gloves?’
‘We’re’ is a contraction of ‘we are’.
For example:
‘We’re going to watch the fireworks, find your gloves!’
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