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Programed Spelling Demons
Fourth Edition
by George W. Feinstein
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A housewife was horrified when her little Barbara came home from school and proudly announced: "Today we learned how to make babies."
"W-what do you mean?"
"We drop the y and add ies."
Good for Barbara! She has now also learned how to make cities, stories, armies, navies, and libraries. She is mastering useful rules and useful words, and that is as it should be.
Some spelling programs emphasize "hard" words--like irascible, hemorrhage, pharyngitis, syzygy--the breed of words used in national spelling bees to make competitors sweat bullets. Unfortunately, you and I use words like that only about once in seven years, and then we'd be fools not to check their spelling in a dictionary anyhow. It's the demons--words like its, doesn't, business, and receive--that deserve our most serious, eagle-eyed attention. This workbook is designed to help weak spellers, not Rhodes scholar candidates.
Programed Spelling Demons has certain distinctive features:
1. It is basic. It concentrates on those common pesty words which account for a remarkable 90 percent of student spelling errors.
2. It is programed, enabling students to work alone and at their own pace; yet it can be the basis for classroom assignments and testing.
3. It makes use of a phonics approach, focusing on additive doubling, ie-or-ei, final silent e, pronunciation aids, tricky endings, words often confused, plurals, capitals, apostrophes, and basic principles. It may tackle a word like writing in the hoping-hopping section, later in the final silent e chapter, and once again in a review of nasty, blue-ribbon demons.
4. It puts spelling words into sentence contexts.
5. It encourages development of useful spelling rules by the student, but it ignores spelling rules that are riddled by exceptions to exceptions.
6. It offers a preliminary diagnostic test and a final-day comprehensive test, available to the instructor in the Instructor's Manual, so that spelling improvement in the course can be measured.
7. It stresses drill more than theory, because it assumes that basic spelling--the same as typing or knitting--must be made largely automatic.
8. It includes supplementary lists and exercises as a challenge to ambitious students.
9. It presents its material in a simple, natural sequence that involves no drafty page-turning from frame to answer.
10. It is accompanied by pretests, final tests, and review ideas for each chapter, available to the instructor in the Instructor's Manual.
11. It has been polished and improved by use in classes at more than two hundred colleges and universities and is producing extremely favorable results.
12. It can be used by college students, high school students, a lighthouse-keeper; the only prerequisite is a talent for misspelling words
Four chapters entitled "Fight Those Demons!" are new in this fourth edition. They are spaced at intervals among other chapters, rather than consecutively, for variety and impact. Many chapters of the prior edition have been retained, with some changes in tests and quizzes.
How to Use This Manual
1. Cover the answers at the left side of each page with a strip of paper or with your hand.
2. Take up one "frame," or numbered box, at a time.
3. Note carefully any spelling words, explanations, or directions at the beginning of a frame. Have a dictionary near you and look up any term that is not completely clear.
4. Fill in all the blanks of a frame with complete correct spellings, choices, or other answers as indicated.
5. After finishing the whole frame, uncover enough of the key at the left to check your answers. The answer key is numbered the same as the frame and will be found in front of the following frame.
6. If your answers are correct, go on to the next frame.
7. If you have made an error, be sure to correct it. Go back, if necessary, and study the explanations again before you go on. Any word that gives you special spelling trouble-whether in this manual or in your English compositions-should be entered into your Personal List of Demons at the end of this book. Later you will review your personal demons.
8. Complete an entire quiz or entire review test-the same as with each frame-before you check or grade your answers to it.
9. Write neatly and clearly. The act of careful writing, as well as the repetition, will help the learning process.
10. Take additional chapter pretests and review tests as your teacher decides, based on the Instructor's Manual.
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