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A total of 536 pages of advice to ensure that our writings are free of spelling mistakes and adhere to the uses and customs of the best Castilian, including basic and classical spelling, punctuation, accents, capitals ... everything that the Royal Academy of the language is concerned, but also other things that it does not: paragraphs, alignment, structure and ... punctuation, the most important and what we most fail in our writings today, according to Ramón Almela, author of this monumental " Manual of good spelling practices ", and retired professor of UMU who, for decades, offered Grammar class, as a professor of Spanish Language to more than 10,000 students who today quote him as their teacher.

The work includes a good number of corrected real texts, with the original and final text, and pays special attention to the complete correction process, which makes this publication an invaluable resource to learn to write properly.

The book, edited by Editum, Publications Service of the University of Murcia, includes a series of useful annexes, including a list of abbreviations (something that, unfortunately, according to the author, does not take into account any criteria , especially in Social Networks), list of countries and capitals with their names, models of instances and bibliographic references among others.

The publication was presented this afternoon at the Convalecencia, headquarters of the Rector's Office, in a ceremony in which the rector José Luján Alcara, in addition to the author, took part;

Francisco Javier Martínez Méndez, Vice-rector of Quality, Culture and Communication;

Alfredo Pérez Morales, Studies Coordinator;

Rosana López Carreño, Coordinator of Publications and Digital Heritage, and Juan Antonio Pastor Sánchez, Coordinator of Information Systems.

Almela clarified that it has long been added to the Improvement Plan of Spelling at the University of Murcia, providing the raw material for a large team to incorporate during the last 11 months much of the material included in this volume.

Almela alluded to the fact that the work arose from the conviction that "it seems that every time it is written worse, and considering that we think with language, the better our oral and written language, the better our way of articulating thought".

The professor alludes to the fact that when writing a text, one must always be very careful and have a certain responsibility, since "good spelling, like almost everything, is transmitted, and also bad spelling".

Orthographic laboratory

The book is part of a generic plan that includes four parts: on the one hand the publication on paper and the book on the web, which incorporates some novelties regarding the printed work.

Another section is the orthographic observatory, in which all the members of the university community will have access to the professor to review texts of internal management of the university and, finally, CRAU credits for the students, in which they will be able to obtain credits by answering 300 questions about the use of Spanish.

The difference with the RAE, Almela alludes, is that "we not only show the good use of Spanish, but we try to teach, hence the abundant examples included in the book, which include morphology and lexicon, as well as various abbreviations" , and cites the striking example that the RAE does not collect the abbreviation of mayor.

In addition, "for the first time in Spain real administrative texts are included as they were written and as I propose that they be written".

Writing, to worse

Almela affirms that it is evident that "every time it is written worse", a phenomenon that, in his opinion, is not at all alien to the rise of new technologies, a circumstance that he already called attention to in the year 2000, when it began the rise of sms, and, after studying about two and a half thousand of these messages, confirmed that "social networks are one of the causes of bad writing", "the problem adds- is that this is transferred to other areas more formal. "

"In that area, the university has a lot to correct."

For the teacher, the environment in which mistakes are most made is undoubtedly in the scoring: "the comma, the colon, the semicolon in any form, without taking into account that each one of them is used. has a concept associated. "

Among the reasons why this happens, Almela also highlights the fact that the habit of reading aloud has been lost, "because punctuation is connected with orality".

Finally, the professor stated that "the most important thing and the most difficult thing is to relate language and thought, good spelling does not consist of putting haches or bes where appropriate, but adapting everything you intend to say with the words you use, in the proper order and the relationship they have in the thought, that is what should be taken care of from the point of view of education, to connect the language with the ideas ".

Rosana López Carreño, Coordinator of Publications and Digital Heritage, affirmed that this book presented today "offers a wide range of guidelines, norms and data that can be considered useful for a correct written expression of Spanish", and affirmed that it is a contribution of "quality to the editorial stamp of the University of Murcia".

Finally, Rector Luján stated that "As a society we have a challenge, which has to do with the good use of language and spelling, because language is the tool that we humans have to communicate, and by communicating we cooperate, and by cooperating we advance ", and added that with this book" the UMU puts on the table a very useful instrument to better use the lenguanje in its sense and in its form ".

And he concluded by stating that he is convinced that this book has already been born as a classic: "this publication will be in the future, as the classics are known, 'the Almela', the reference book to which to turn to any doubt".

"The better our oral and written language is, the better our way of articulating thinking"

"Good spelling, like almost everything, is contagious, and also bad spelling."

"Social networks are one of the causes of bad writing"

Source: Universidad de Murcia