The Problem:
This week I was working with a student helping him to improve his writing skills. He asked how to spell Cadillac because the spell check did not give him the spelling. He had spelled it as “Catlact”. This problem is typical of individuals who have an auditory perception problem, what I call blurred hearing. Because the person does not hear the sounds in words clearly, he cannot produce them, often mispronouncing words and spelling them the way he hears them.
The Mnemonic Clue
This memory clue is a combination of a pattern and a stack. Cadillac is remembered using the following pattern: the first and last letters are the same, as are the second and the next to last letter. By stacking the letters as demonstrated below, the person has a visual image of the word Cadillac, providing an easy way to remember how to spell it.
C
C
a
a
dill
Richard Cooper, Ph.D.
July 4, 2005