Okay, let me tell you about this one word that used to drive me nuts: honestly. For the longest time, I just couldn’t get it right consistently. It felt silly, you know? Such a common word, but my fingers would just fumble on the keyboard or when writing it down.
I remember typing emails, wanting to say something like “Honestly, I think…”, and then pausing. Was it h-o-n-e-s-t-l-y? Or did it have an extra ‘e’ somewhere? Maybe h-o-n-s-t-l-y? My brain just blanked. I’d often just type ‘frankly’ or ‘to be honest’ instead, just to avoid the potential screw-up. It was properly annoying because ‘honestly’ often felt like the right word I wanted to use.
I tried the usual stuff. You know, looking it up, trying to burn the spelling into my brain. I probably wrote it down like twenty times in a row on a piece of scrap paper once. It seemed to work for a bit, but then, under pressure, or just typing fast, bam! Messed it up again. The ‘h’ at the beginning, even though it’s silent, was part of the problem. And that ‘e’ after the ‘n’. My brain just wanted to skip them sometimes.
So, what finally clicked for me? It sounds really basic now, but I had to stop trying to remember the whole long word at once. I started thinking about the root word: honest. I knew how to spell ‘honest’. H-O-N-E-S-T. Got that bit down solid.
Then I just told myself, okay, you just need to add the ‘ly’ to the end. Like ‘slow’ becomes ‘slowly’, ‘honest’ becomes ‘honestly’. So, H-O-N-E-S-T… L-Y. That was it. Focusing on the ‘honest’ part first, making sure that ‘h’ was there right at the start, even if I couldn’t hear it, and then just tacking on the ‘ly’.
I did have to practice it consciously for a little while. I made myself use the word in texts or notes when I could have used something else. Just typed it out deliberately: h-o-n-e-s-t-l-y. Seeing it spelled correctly by my own hand, again and again, seemed to lock it in place.
Now, it’s pretty much automatic. Don’t even have to think about it. It’s just one of those little things, but figuring out that simple trick for myself made a difference. Maybe someone else struggles with this word too, so thought I’d share what finally worked for me. Just break it down.
