•December 6, 2023•

How do people learn good grammar? Likely the same way people learn to be good spellers.

I just read a piece in The Washington Post by ninth-grader Dev Shah of Largo, Florida, in which he talks about how he managed to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee this year.

In his essay, Dev writes about how reading dictionaries is one way to win, but with more than a half-million words to memorize, intuition is key.

He didn’t expect to win, the contest. He failed to qualify last year and has lost more than two dozen bees in six years.

But he knew this year was his final shot, because he’d age out of the competition.

Of the millions of competitive child spellers out there, just 200 make it to the national bee.

Looking for patterns in pronunciations is key, he says:

    Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.