How to Avoid the Homophone Trap

More and more people are writing articles for the Internet. They are blogging, posting how to pieces on eHow and taking advantage of the numerous online writing opportunities. Because of the instant quality of internet writing, an article can be online for the entire world to see within minutes. Typically the author is the only one who has proofed the piece before it goes live. Writers often use spell check to catch spelling errors, but there is another writing pitfall – homophones. Homophones are words that sound the same, yet have different meanings. They may be spelled the same – such as rose (the past tense of rise) and rose (the flower) – or they may have different spellings. Those are the homophones that get writers into trouble; words like heel and heal, or fir and fur. Some homophones are easy to catch, others, like principal and principle, might stump the writer.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Word processor

1. Use a word processor to write your article. Common word processors include Word Perfect or Word. These offer features like spell check, grammar check and a thesaurus feature.

2. Highlight the word you wish to check.

3. Click on the thesaurus feature offered with your software program. This will bring up menu with a list of words with similar meanings. If those words aren't similar in meaning to the word you meant, then perhaps you've used the wrong homophone.

4. Cut and paste your finished article to whatever online site you are publishing with.

Tips & Warnings

• If the word you are checking is plural, make it singular tense before checking it with the thesaurus feature.