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VIDEO introduction to Personal Best Spelling |
Who are these lists for?
Lists of medical terms can be purchased by medical practitioners and others. You do not have to purchase Personal Best Spelling to use these lists. However, Personal Best Spelling, Professional Version, is set up so you can quickly learn how to spell these medical terms.
Personal Best Spelling™ users can purchase and use hundreds of word lists when the program is registered. Unregistered, the program contains two word lists for demonstration purposes only.
Instructions for registering the program and importing word lists are contained here.
Features
For convenience, most word lists lists are organised into categories, e.g., specific areas of professional practice, e.g., neurology; words that typically cause spelling problems (demons); and so on.
Please note the following details about these lists:
- Lists are zipped text files (ASCII DOS TEXT) contained in a compressed (zipped) file, take up very little disk space on your computer, will download quickly and are accompanied by a brief description.
- Lists are only available in U.S. English, at this time. However, lists can easily be edited within the program to suit your own spelling conventions.
- These lists are provided "as is" and, apart from being updated from time to time, there is no further support provided for these lists.
- New lists become available, from time to time.
Available word lists
Medical word lists are available for Personal Best Spelling™ V2 for AUD$3. Words follow the U.S. spelling convention but can be edited to conform to other spelling conventions. Intending users should check that the terms are suitable for use within their own medical practice.
Medical terms are sorted into approximately 600 separate word lists covering the following medical fields, among others:
- cardiovascular
- dermatology
- gastrology
- male reproductive
- musculoskeletal
- nephrology
- neurology
- neuropsychology
- obstetrics and gynecology
- oncology
- opthalmology
- radiology
- respiratory
- urology
- oncology
Medical word lists are organised alphabetically within each medical specialty. Words are listed alphabetically within each word list.
Medical terminology "demons", those terms that typically cause spelling problems, are also covered in 65 lists.
You can fully edit word lists—add new terms, delete outdated terms and alter the spelling of any word in the list to suit your own spelling conventions.
You can even create your own word lists and include only those words that you habitually misspell or always have to look up in a medical dictionary. This is the best way to use the spelling program.
The file containing the entire set of word lists of medical terms is delivered as an attachment to an email we will send you after you place your order. To install the word lists, right-click on the email attachment named medwordssorted.zip, select Save As and save it to your Downloads folder. Then, start the spelling program, click Import, navigate to the Downloads folder, select your zip file and click Open. Screen shots showing these steps in greater detail can be found here.
Learning medical terms
The file containing the entire set of word lists is delivered as an attachment to an email we will send you after you place your order. To install the word lists, right-click on the email attachment you ordered, namely medwordssorted.zip, select Save As and save it to your Downloads folder. Then, start the spelling program, click Import, navigate to the Downloads folder, select your file and click Open. Screen shots showing these steps in greater detail can be found here.
As useful as these word lists are, they cannot hope to cover all the words you might want or need to learn.
Therefore, the spelling program lets you create your own word lists. This can be done either within the program itself or by using a text editor or word processor and then importing the list. Instructions are contained within the program and here.
You can fully edit word lists—add new terms, delete outdated terms and alter the spelling of any word in the list to suit your own spelling conventions. In fact, you are encouraged to edit the lists in order to make them more suitable for your own use.
You can create your own word lists that include only those words that you habitually misspell or always have to look up in a dictionary.
Word lists can contain different kinds of entries all mixed together. A word list can contain entries that consist of one word, e.g., enucleated, or an entry can be a medical term that consists of multile words, e.g., arcus senilis. An entry can also consist of an abbreviation along with its expanded form, e.g., CIS (carcinoma in situ).
This flexibility in creating your own word lists is also useful when learning a foreign language that may require word list entries to contain multiple words, e.g., billet-doux.
Basically, you can enter whatever you like into a word list. The important thing to note, though, is that when the program asks you to spell (type) the word you must type it from memory exactly as it was first entered, including any spaces, brackets, hyphens, punctuation marks, and so on.
If what you type does not mirror exactly what was originally entered then it will register an error and you will be asked to re-enter the item. For this reason, you may wish to edit some of the entries in the word lists prior to use, in order to make each entry more suitable for your own preferences.
Here are three examples of different ways you can use the word lists that you create.
- You have received a list of new words that you have to learn.
Create a word list containing these words using the spelling
program and then use the Learn Words section of the program to
learn the words in the word list.
Important - keep your word lists short, say no more than 5 words in a list, especially when using the program for the first time. Far better to have two lists each containing 5 words than one list with 10 words.
Why? The program takes time to walk you through each word list and if the list is long then the whole process imay be too lengthy and demanding. As well, the program won't let you stop half way through a list and then pick up from where you left off when you restart the program next time; it makes you start all over again from the beginning of a word list.
Therefore, you should work through all the words in a word list in one sitting. That is no problem if your word list is short but it can become somewhat strenuous if your word list is long.
You may find that some of the word lists that are supplied with the program are simply too long to learn in one session. This problem can be overcome by splitting the word list into two or more shorter lists. This can be done within the program or by using a word processor or text editor such as Notepad or WordPad. Word lists must be saved as a "text" file with a .txt extension. - You have some words that you are unsure how to spell and you always have to look up the spelling. Create one or more word lists containing these words and then use the Correct Words section of the program to learn how to spell and remember these words, once and for all.
- You have learnt some new words using the Learn Words section
of the program and now want to practice those words and test
yourself. Use the Test Spelling section of the program to do
this. It will improve your memory for spelling and provide the
necessary practice.
Of course, the best way to practice your spelling is to use the new words that you have learned in your day-to-day writing. Remember, if you don't use it; you'll lose it!
Orders (Windows PC)
Personal Best Spelling™ is a unique learning tool for use with medical terms and other professional vocabularies.
Personal Best Spelling™:
- has transformed many poor spellers into proficient, confident spellers when all other methods failed
- is a genuine learning tool for spelling, not just another computer game dressed up as educational software
- does not insult the adult learner's intelligence
- is being used by adult and workplace literacy tutors, adult learners, medical practitioners, police officers, colleges, universities, companies and government departments to improve their spelling
- identifies your bad spelling habits (habit pattern errors) and quickly corrects them, once and for all
- helps you learn and remember your words from one day to the next
- tests your spelling and tracks your progress
- uses proven learning methods endorsed by Australian state government education departments
- is the only spelling tutor that uses Old Way/New Way®, an effective research-based and user-friendly learning method
- uses an improved version of Look Say Cover Write Check, the old standby method for learning spelling
- has the option of purchasing hundreds of editable word lists in both US English and UK/Oz English, plus you can create and edit your own lists
- runs on Windows computers.
