Spelling and punctuation: the easy marks people lose

Spelling is one of the cheapest skills on a PTE score report to improve, because a misspelt word is a fixed error: learn it once and it stops costing you. It is one of the enabling skills, and it is measured in the answers you type. Nobody is impressed by a correctly spelt "necessary", but a wrong one is visible every time it appears.

Pick one spelling style and keep it

British and American spellings are both standard English, but mixing them in one answer looks careless. Decide now, practise in that style, and stay with it. These are the pairs that get mixed:

• colour and color, behaviour and behavior
• organise and organize, analyse and analyze
• centre and center, travelling and traveling
• practise (verb) and practice (noun) in British English, where American English uses practice for both

If you write "organise", do not write "neighbor" three lines later.

Twenty words worth learning

These academic words turn up in essays and summaries, and they are often misspelt. Learn them in groups, by the problem they pose:

• Doubled letters: accommodation (two c, two m), occurrence (two c, two r), beginning (two n), successful (two c, two s), recommend (one c, two m), opportunity (two p), necessary (one c, two s)
• Letters people drop or add: government and environment (the n before the m), argument and development (no extra e before -ment), knowledge (the d), pronunciation (the verb pronounce loses its o)
• Endings that sound alike: independent (-ent), significant (-ant), responsibility (-ibility)
• Tricky vowels: separate (there is a rat in the middle), definitely (finite is inside it), achieve and receive (i before e, except after c)

Learn five at a time, and put each one in a sentence about your own life. "I would recommend the accommodation near my college" sticks better than a flashcard.

Capitals, commas, its and it's, full stops

• Capitals. Start every sentence with one, write I as a capital, and use them for names of people, places, organisations, languages, nationalities, days and months. Common nouns in the middle of a sentence stay small: the university, a government. Compare "i studied english in pune and now i work at a bank" with "I studied English in Pune, and now I work at a bank."
• Commas. Use them between items in a list (milk, tea and coffee) and after an opening phrase (In recent years, prices have risen.). Do not put one between a subject and its verb: "Students who work part time, often feel tired" is wrong.
• Its and it's. It's always means "it is" or "it has". If you cannot replace it with "it is", you want its. "The council changed its plan, and it's a sensible change."
• Full stops. One at the end of every complete sentence. Do not use a comma where a full stop belongs; see fixing comma splices.

Do not rely on a spell checker

Write as though no spell checker exists, because you cannot count on one. Typing under time also creates errors that are different from the ones you make on paper: swapped letters (teh), missing letters (goverment) and real words in the wrong place. Even a spell checker would miss that last kind, because every word on the page is a real word. The pairs to watch are their (belongs to them), there (place) and they're (they are); than (comparison) and then (time); affect (usually a verb) and effect (usually a noun). "Noise can affect sleep, and one effect is tiredness."

So proofread by reading words as words, not by skimming for meaning.

A 60-second proofreading routine

1. 15 seconds, backwards. Read your last sentence, then the one before it, and so on. Without the story to carry you along, your eye catches more.
2. 20 seconds, your list. Scan for your own five worst words. If you do not have the list yet, start one today.
3. 15 seconds, pairs. Check every its and it's, their and there, then and than.
4. 10 seconds, style. Check capitals and full stops, and that your spelling is still all British or all American.

To practise, type 100 words about your day, set a one-minute timer and run the routine. Count what you find. Three times a week is plenty.

Today, write down the five words you misspell most often and learn those before anything else. Then run the routine on a timed essay in the practice tests.