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My son is learning how to spell. He is doing a good job listening to sounds and working out spelling that way (which doesn't work for many words, but at least a lot of common ones), but although he's gotten the -ing chunk, he frequently misses doubling letters in these words.
Is there a guideline for when the end consonant is doubled? He's working on these sorts of words:
- riding
- sitting
- skating
- writing
- getting
Kit Z. Fox
Posted 2013-01-24T01:08:42.850
Reputation: 1 026
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Are they still teaching the old 'long/short' vowels? If so, here's the rule:
If the syllable before the /-ing/ is pronounced with a 'long' vowel, leave the final consonant single (and delete any final silent /e/)
If it's pronounced with a 'short' vowel, double the final consonant.
It may help make this clearer if you explain that a vowel before a doubled consonant is (almost) always short. Then write the /-ing/ forms out 'wrong' and invite your son to pronounce them the way they look:
ride ridding
sit siting
skate skatting
write writting
get geting
As Renan points out, it gets more complicated when the final syllable of the base form is unstressed; but it looks like your son hasn't gotten that far yet.
StoneyB on hiatus
Posted 2013-01-24T01:08:42.850
Reputation: 176 469
8
For verbs ending in 'el' such as travel, cancel, chisel, excel, fuel, funnel, grovel, label, marvel etc, remember that British English requires a double 'l' as in 'travelling', whereas American English does not.
Walrus
Posted 2013-01-24T01:08:42.850
Reputation: 723
5
From here, you double the consonant when:
For your other words (ride -> riding, skate -> skating, write -> writing) the e is dropped and replaced by ing.
Renan
Posted 2013-01-24T01:08:42.850
Reputation: 3 733
2
We have verbs whose final letter -e is silent, e.g., to hope. When -ing or -ed is added the letter e is dropped to avoid clumsy spellings such as hopeing or hopeed.
If we wrote hop and hoping we would not see whether hoping is from the verb to hope, or to hop.
That is the reason for consonant doubling after short and stressed vowels (a e i o u) + one consonant.
Consonant doubling also occurs with long and stressed vowels as in to refer and referring and with unstressed vowels (only special endings) as in to travel / travelling (American spelling: traveling).
rogermue
Posted 2013-01-24T01:08:42.850
Reputation: 8 304
2
Does this answer your question? Why is there one P in "hoping" and two P's in "hopping"?
– None – 2020-05-24T21:21:04.340I rather think my seven year old question answers the one asked last month, rather than the other way around. – Kit Z. Fox – 2020-06-01T21:39:38.320
We could close that question as a duplicate of this one, in which case we'd be giving preference to a less accurate accepted answer. Please don't take this the wrong way. These are, after all, just answers to questions, and we want them to be correct. We're not taking your child away from you. : ) I get how it feels, though. – None – 2020-06-02T02:31:16.853
I don't think we need to close the more recent one with more detailed answers. That one probably ought to have been closed as a dupe of this before it had lots of answers, but it doesn't really matter. This was one of the original founding questions for the site. It was intended to be canonical. – Kit Z. Fox – 2020-06-02T18:07:35.583
Well, that didn't happen, and this isn't a canonical question/answer. The option is there; I say we just do the right thing. People can only gain from it... – None – 2020-06-06T17:41:34.893