English Spelling & Punctuation

English Spelling & Punctuation (ESP) is a new and exciting app that will help you to improve your spelling and punctuation skills. The app includes many exercises to help you practise the 200 most commonly misspelled English words.

ESP is a practical app written to help you understand the rules of spelling that are useful to know, while recognizing that we all have difficulty with irregular English spelling. ESP includes a set of top words that are both frequent and frequently misspelled, and it helps you practise these irregular or difficult English words. Spell-checkers may 'correct' your spelling, but often offer you the wrong word choice. There is no substitute for knowing the correct spelling yourself!

ESP also includes an extensive guide to punctuation, so that you'll never mix up your commas, colons and semicolons again!

ESP includes:
• Interactive exercises that help you practise regular and irregular spelling
• A self-learning course on punctuation standards in a range of contexts, including academic writing
• An extensive glossary of important terms

REAL ENGLISH, REAL EXAMPLES
Like our other apps, ESP uses examples of English sentences from our natural language corpus, ICE-GB, as well as from online resources. ICE-GB is a linguistic database compiled and analysed at University College London (UCL) and used by researchers around the world.

INTERACTIVE EXERCISES
English is notoriously irregular in its spelling. We designed ESP's spelling exercises in two sections:

• Spelling Rules: ESP lets you practise morphological spelling rules, i.e. rules that tell you how to spell a word which has had an ending (like '-ed') added to it.

• Spelling Practice: The free version of ESP's Spelling Practice module comes with the most common, frequently incorrectly spelled 200 words in adult English. Each word is presented in context with a few letters missing, and your task is to complete the correct spelling.

Our app is designed to simulate, as far as possible, the difficulties many people have when they struggle with words that are hard to spell.

The Spelling Practice module tracks your progress, letting you focus on the words you find most difficult.

LEARN FROM EXPERTS
ESP is written by a team of linguists at UCL, independently ranked as one of the world's best universities. The approach in the app is based on recent research and best practice in the field, as well as years of experience in writing and teaching.

WHO IS ESP FOR?
Spelling is not just for kids! ESP is designed for teenagers and adults who struggle to get their spelling right first time, but who need to use an advanced vocabulary to succeed. It is for native and non-native speakers of English, but, thanks to that advanced vocabulary, it is not a beginner's English app.

You can practise British English spelling, practice American English spelling, or both.