A common problem for English learners is spelling.  Oh, let’s be honest, whoever designed English spelling needs to be _____ (I’ll let you fill in the blank with your idea for the best punishment).  Despite all the horrible spellings, there are usually rules to most words—we just have a LOT of rules with their nuances (and exceptions).

One rule that is pretty easy to understand is the one regarding when to double the consonant at the end of the word when adding suffixes like –ed and –es and –ing (i.e., suffixes beginning with vowels).

So you’re asking yourself: is the gerund of “write” “writing” or “writting”? Let’s see:

• To know if we need to double the consonant, we must look at the last three letters of the root word.  They MUST be consonant-vowel-consonant.  If there is any other combination of letters, the last consonant is NOT doubled.

• Act (ends in two consonants, so don’t double the last one) → Acted
• Threat (there are two vowels before the last consonant, so don’t double) → Threaten
• Write (ends in a vowel, so there’s no last consonant to double!) → Writing
• In all the words that do end with consonant-vowel-consonant, we must now look at where the stress of the word is (i.e., where would we put the accent mark like we would in Spanish).