Spellers run the gamut from appalling to superb. In Anguished English, Richard Lederer provides examples of misspellings from students’ papers, which you can see by mousing over each sentence below:

• “I am in the mists of choosing colleges.”
• “During peek season the beach is covered with hundreds of bikini-clad beauties.”
• “I know people who have found dishes and tools and bowels from the Indians.”

Although they can be entertaining, bad spelling mistakes are also embarrassing, especially if you are promoting a business or a public event. Take the sign in the picture to the left; the correct spelling is cemetery. The man who is holding the sign can’t easily undo any negative perceptions about his ability to spell since this photo is avaialble to millions of people on the Internet.

You probably know that the top tier of superb spellers competes each year in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, where narcolepsy, sarcophagus, and antediluvian are among the winning words. However, it’s not just those challenging words that present problems for people who spend their lives making sure words are spelled correctly. Even editors make mistakes. Phil Corbett, Associate Editor of the New York Times, tallied the use of the word indispensable in the Times. He found that his reputable newsroom had spelled indispensable correctly 161 times in the last year. “Unfortunately,” he admits, “we spelled it incorrectly, as ‘indispensible,’ 17 times, an error rate of nearly 10 percent.”

In this “spellbinding” lesson, you will review rules and commonly misspelled words like indispensable. You will learn when to use the spell-checker and when to override it with your own good judgment. You will even test your spelling expertise on a proofreading exercise.