Great idea for helping pupils remember tricky spellings of words which are similar to each other. This is the American edition of the book so has some differences to those that would be in the UK edition.

Thank you #NetGalley and Lidia Stanton for this fun read of the visual mnemonics for everyone. My brother is a teacher and my grandma was a resource teacher so I had opportunity to show them bits of this book and they agreed this would / will be very helpful for all elementary- middle school children.

Mnemonics weren't something I was readily taught in school, and this book would have been super helpful to have when I was younger. I particularly loved the cartoons, colouring and visual-cues in addition to the helpful phrases, rhymes and mnemonics. I'm keeping this book ear-marked for the current and future kids in my life! :)

This book is full of great tips and advice on how to remember tricky spelling for children. It is a great resource to have at hand when they are writing. There is an index so you can quickly look
Up The word you want to spell. I found the examples on homophones to be useful, with helpful ways to get children to remember which homophone to use. Great resource to use at home and in education.

I liked how this book was formatted with both pictures and sentences using the words. I also appreciated the index in the back so it was easy to find the word you were struggling with. It was easy to understand and I think many people who struggle with spelling or remembering the definition of some words will find this book helpful.

- M

Pros: This was a delightful book of cartoons to help kids learn words that aren’t spelled how they sound like they should be spelled. Adults could also benefit from reading this book and learning or relearning proper spelling and grammar (e.g. affect v. effect; aisle v. isle; desert v. dessert). Some of these mnemonics are ones I learned as a kid, and many others were new to me.

Cons: I think this book would be even better if the cartoons were in color. It’s possible that just the review copy is in black and white and the published book will have color.

Thank you to NetGalley and Jessica Kingsley Publishers for the opportunity to read this review copy!

I 100% think that this book should be in every home, classroom, library, workplace.... anywhere that their are people, this needs to be!
I cannot believe how much that I have picked up from reading it - it is easy to read, accessible and appropriate for all ages where spelling becomes essential!
As a teacher, I will definitely be purchasing a copy to share with my class.
10/10!

I would recommend this book to 4th - 8th grade teachers who teach the art of writing. There are some really great illustrations and ideas on how and when to use some tricky words (for example, accept and except). This book could come in handy in those teachable moments that just pop up during lessons.

200 Tricky Spellings in Cartoons is interesting. However I did not find it especially easy to use and some of the descriptions were confusing.

This didn't really do it for me. I found the stories were sometimes so random and had nothing to do with the word they were supposedly helping you to spell, which just made it all more confusing. I also disliked the gender stereotypes that appear throughout.

Some of these cartoons and memory tricks will be helpful for kids (or adults) but many of them are just weird and will not stick for most people. A lot of them involve telling a story and then you remember the story to remember how to spell the word (like a boy has to brake his car because there's a bra in the road, so remember bra is in brake). They're such stretches and not normal things you'd associate with each other that I can't see you really remembering them. There were a few that were clever, but the book became overly long pretty quickly and not that much fun to read. I'm not sure how many kids would really read through this book and also commit the mnemonics to memory, but there are some fun gems in it.

I read a temporary digital ARC of this book for review.

What a great book! Such a fun and clever way to teach the spelling of tricky words! This is definitely a book I will be using in my primary school classroom!

This book would be a great addition to a classroom, middle grade or even middle school as it provides some great tips/tricks to remember the difference between words. I even found it helpful while reading! The accompanying illustrations also help add to the mnemonics to remember the differences.

The perfect book for every person, not just school aged to remember how to spell more complex words. It can be used as a resource to visit time and time again, similar to a dictionary.

This is a very creative way to share mnemonics of multiple meaning words or words that sound alike. I think this would be a great reference in a classroom. It has an index to easily look words up.

This is a great book for kids and adult. It gives you ideas and mnemonics on how to improve your spelling.. Some work and a few doesn't but. it's a lot of fun and a little silly. The pictures are cute. My kids love it. A great book to read.

This says it is a children's book, but I think every person needs to read this every 5 years! Adults are the WORST with grammar and spelling of common words! I would have loved to see this book with color, but overall I really loved this book! It has every possible common misspelled/misused word! I believe we are the smartest when we were in high school and forced to know these things! Somewhere after high school graduation people tend to forget what they learned for years!

A little background please. I have spent a decade of my life as a freelance English trainer for adult learners, and one of the most troublesome parts for students to learn in this language after grammar is spellings. I made up my own mnemonics for words such as discrete, complement, separate, etc. to help them remember the right spellings and this concept never failed. So I believe in the power of mnemonics in making confusing spellings easier to remember.
That said, a mnemonic has to be sensibly made. A forced connection between a word and its clue hardly ever works. So a clue that connects “deSSert” with “sweet stuff” is brilliant and will function effectively. But a clue that connects a “bra” on the road with a driver stepping on the “BRAke” suddenly is just silly. Both are examples from this book.
The entire book, thus, has a medley of brilliant (complement, insure, piece, there, bargain, broccoli, and a few more) and silly (flour, pronunciation, quite, steal, awkward, and many, many more!) mnemonics. Unfortunately, the misses outnumbered the hits for me.
The title of the book indicates clearly that it teaches readers how to handle tricky spellings. However, most of the illustrations/examples don’t even tackle the tricky part. Instead, they create a mnemonic for another part of the word. For instance, in the word “castle”, the confusing part for learners is whether the word should be spelt “castle” or “castel”. However, the mnemonic explains the “cast” part of the spelling rather than tackling the tle/tel dilemma. This same error occurs multiple times over the course of the book. The purpose of the mnemonic is lost in such cases.
In addition, some of the clues don’t fit the actual meaning of the words such as in “reassure” or “caricature”. Psychiatry vs. psychology are actually common confusables but there’s just a passing reference to them without any mnemonic aid provided. Lastly, it is essential that mnemonics work on the same phonetic sound as the word. Else, they might end up creating pronunciation errors. So a “SCHool” for “SCHedule” mnemonic works fabulously but a “Get it” for “Gist” doesn’t.
I thought I might have been reading it with too rigid a perspective given my background. So I asked my thirteen year old to volunteer her opinion on some of the mnemonics provided. She found even those few pages obscure and weird. I actually had to explain to her how the bra for brake mnemonic worked, and she just stared back at me in disbelief. Mind you, she is a very advanced reader. So this doesn’t bode well for the book.
Overall, this was a book with a fabulous potential idea that lost its way somewhere during implementation. The only reason I didn’t DNF this book was because it is a very quick read in spite of its 272 pages. Otherwise, I doubt I would have trudged through it. I’m sorry but this book just didn’t work for me.