Self Improvement

I’ve always been relatively good at English spelling/grammar throughout my life compared to other native speakers, so take my word with a grain of salt because I took to it very naturally.

There’s two parts to learning and grinding written language competence, off the top of my head: internalizing the rules and reading a lot.

While English is commonly derided for not being consistent, there are still | general | principles that can be applied to most non-loanwords in the language. Internalize them in the ways that can be most easily referenced as a fallback. For example: a common mnemonic for English double-vowel order I used when I was younger is “I before E except after C.” Pick a strategy that works for you—one that you can gradually habitualize.

The second part of it is you have to read. A lot. And not just posts, books. Articles. Written works that have been most-likely proofread by others. By reading consistently, you internalize words, general principles, and common turns of phrase.

Hope this helps. I’m not an expert, I caught on at a young age so I’m sort of correlating the fact that I was relatively quick and early to start reading, and I think it really helped me stand out with my comparative grammatical competence when I was a kid.

I mean, I'm definitely coming at this from my own perspective, but I think that for a language with as much historical spelling as English, that the best way to learn the spelling is literally by learning the history: to look at the etymologies and sound changes to really understand the "why" of English spelling instead of just memorizing arbitrary rules, and then memorizing the countless arbitrary exceptions to those arbitrary rules. One thing that might particularly help in a pinch is to think of pairs of related words, for instance "muscle" and "muscular", "illustrate" and "illustrious".

Some YouTube channels I like that talk about this sort of thing include Alliterative and Simon Roper, there's also Dr. Geoff Lindsey and Jackson Crawford and polýMATHY among others who are sort of in that same "periphery". I also spend a lot of time looking at Wiktionary, which is basically a dictionary of all the world's languages, so you can end up in various rabbit holes of ancestral forms of words and related words and sound change and all that.

I also think that it's important to sort of "kill the cop in your head", because when you learn to "improve your spelling and grammar" what you're really doing is just learning a different written register, as it were. Your "misspellings" reveal traits about your own pronunciation, your "bad grammar" follows an internal logic from how you acquired English as a kid. When average people of ancient times wrote their own equivalents to "I'm relying on" instead of "I rely on" or "illistrate" instead of "illustrate", then that's often been crucial to linguists' understanding of history.

For typing, I'll often type out the misspelled work multiple times the correct way. The repetition helps establish my finger muscle memory.