Mistake Number One:
This was a student who wrote <*sking> rather than <skiing>. He had actually written it that way twice in his story. I sat down with him for about 2 minutes and we talked about the different parts of that word . He was able to say that it was made up of "ski" plus "ing". When I asked him about the spelling of each of those parts, he was able to spell them easily (most kids do know <-ing>). Then I pointed back to his misspelling <*sking> and he immediately said, "I wrote 'sking', not 'skiing'." He corrected it by adding the missing <i>, but I told him that the mistake showed he was smart! He asked why and I explained that his brain must know that we usually don't write a double-i in English, and that's why he didn't write it - even though he didn't know why. In fact, the convention of not writing <ii> dates back to the time before the computer, typewriter, or even printing press. It's from when everything was written in joined script ("cursive writing"). If you write two <i>s in a row, joined up, it looks like the photo above. Try it yourself on a piece of paper and you'll see that it looks like a <u>.
But why does <skiing> have those two <i>s?
<Skiing> is made up of <ski> and <ing>. <Ski> is a borrowing from Norwegian, and that's why it ends with an <i>. No complete word of English origin will end with a <i>. That's why we have <my> (not *mi), fly (not *fly), <classify> etc. In fact, as I like to tell the kids: "The only word that ends with <i> is I! (Some postulate that might be the reason we always capitalise it - to show it's somehow 'different').
But why do we write <flying>, and yet we then have to write <flies>?
<I> and <y> share their job!
When words that end in <y> have a suffix added to them, the <y> will change to an <i> because it's no longer at the end and doesn't need to be a <y> any more. You change the <y> to an <i> unless you have a good reason not to. And there are only three good reasons. They are:
- The <y> is part of a digraph, as in <ay>, <ey>, <oy> and <uy> - e.g. <Playing>, <Guys>, <Keys>, <Annoying> - These all keep their <y>s.
- The <y> needs to stay so as to avoid writing <ii> - For example, <cry> + <ed> --> <cried>, but we don't change the <y> to an <i> in <crying> because then it would be <*criing>, which would look like <crung> in joined script. Keep the <y> instead.
- The word is a compound word. In this case, each of the two component words remains the same. For example - <everyone>, <anybody>, <everywhere> etc. Keep the <y>s.
I hope this is understandable - it's much easier to explain in person or with images (which I may get time to add soon).
More on the second Big Fat Juicy Mistake coming soon - and it was a mistake made by the teacher!