You have probably been told that a verb ending consonant, vowel, consonant doubles its last letter: stop becomes stopping. On the 217 verbs where that rule can apply, it is right about half the time. The missing half of the rule is where the strong part of the word falls, and adding it takes the same rule from about 50% to about 92%.
Core ideas
Three ideas, and the third is the one worth keeping.
Doubling is only ever a question for a verb ending consonant, vowel, consonant — stop, admit, travel. There are 217 of those in the word list, and no other verb is affected. The last lesson scored the -ing rule, doubling and all, on 1,210 regular verbs and it was right 99.34% of the time. That number hides how often the doubling part fails, because most verbs never ask the question.
Of those 217, 107 double and 110 do not. So “double them all” is right 49.3% of the time and “double none” is right 50.7%. A rule that does no better than guessing is not a rule, and this is the form most books print.
Stop has one part, so the last part is the strong one, and it doubles. Travel has two and the strong one is the first, so it does not. Adding that test takes the same rule to 199 of 217, which is 91.7%.
The material
18 verbs are still wrong after the strong-part test. They are not a random 18, and most of them are not wrong at all.
Here is a rule you have met. A verb that ends with a consonant, a vowel and then another consonant doubles its last letter before -ing or -ed. Stop becomes stopping. Plan becomes planned.
Now test it. In the word list this course uses there are 217 verbs that end that way. If you double all of them you are right 107 times. If you double none of them you are right 110 times.
49.3% against 50.7%. Those two numbers are the same number for any use you could put them to. The rule as it is usually given tells you nothing at all about the word in front of you.
That is worth sitting with, because the rule is not wrong. It is half of something that works, and the missing half is never printed beside it.
Say admit out loud, then say travel. In the first you push harder on the second part of the word. In the second you push harder on the first. English spelling cares about that difference here, and only here.
The full rule is: double the last letter when the word ends consonant, vowel, consonant and the last part is the part you say harder. Score that on the same 217 verbs and it is right 199 times, which is 91.7%.
The same letters, the same verbs, the same table. One extra question, and the rule goes from a guess to something you can use.
Every other rule in this course so far worked on letters alone. You could apply them with the sound turned off. This one cannot be done that way, and that is the reason it is the rule learners get wrong most often: it is the only place where you have to know how the word is said before you can write it. Where the strong part falls in other words is the work of the course called Word Stress, in the lesson “Nouns at the Front, Verbs at the Back”.
18 verbs are still wrong, and they are not spread about at random. Eleven of them end in -l: cancel, travel, model, signal and the rest. Those are not broken words. British writers double a final -l whatever the strong part is, and American writers do not. Travelling and traveling are both right, and the list records both. The lab asks whether the list ever records a doubled spelling, so the rule, which writes the American form, is marked wrong on eleven words where nothing is actually wrong.
That leaves seven: benefit, bus, focus, format, input, output, program. Three of them, benefit, focus and program, are the same story again, with both spellings in the list. Format, input and output double against the rule; bus does not double when the rule says it should. Four words is a minute of your time, and then the rule is as good as a rule about English spelling ever gets.
Before the word list was cleaned, three more words sat in this group: offer, suffer and council. None of them belongs here. The list, made by a machine, recorded offerring and sufferring, spellings nobody writes, and it gave council, which is not a verb, the form councilling. Scored against those, a right rule looked wrong three times. The list has since been cleaned by one test: a spelling stays only if a dictionary, a book that records the real spellings of a language, has it, or if it is the British spelling of one the dictionary has. Every spelling removed is named in the lab's table beside the verb it came from. Offer and suffer now count as right, which they always were, and council is in the list of words left out, with the reason.
That is the lesson under the lesson. A hit rate is only as good as the list it is scored on, and a list can be wrong in a way that makes a right rule look wrong. Read the misses, every time.
Interactive
Switch the stress condition off and watch the rule fall to a coin toss
Method
Four questions, in this order.
If not, stop: the rule has nothing to say, and you simply add the ending. A last letter of w, x or y counts as a no.
Listen for which part you say harder. In admit it is the second; in travel it is the first.
admit becomes admitting. If it is not, leave it alone: travelling is British and traveling is American, and the rule here gives you the second.
There are 18, and 11 of them end in -l. Learn that one group and the rule is almost perfect.
Here are the verbs the rule still gets wrong, split by how they end. They are the rows the lab shows under only the ones it gets wrong.
The first group is not an exception at all. It is a second rule: British writers double a final -l whatever the strong part is, and American writers do not. Travelling and traveling are both correct, in different places, and the word list records both. This lab asks a strict question of each verb: does the list ever record a doubled spelling? For these eleven it does, the British one, so the rule is marked wrong even though the form it writes is also in the list. The last lesson counted the same verbs right, because there the test was whether the rule's form is one the list records.
The second group is seven words. Benefit, focus and program are the same story again, with both spellings in the list. Format, input and output double though the strong part comes first; the last two are made from put, which doubles, and keep its spelling. Bus is the one verb the rule doubles and the list does not: busing. Four true exceptions, and you can learn them in a minute.
You should be able to pick out the verbs the rule can touch at all, apply the strong-part question to each, score the rule against a printed list, name the group of words it still gets wrong and what they have in common, and tell a spelling the list has both ways from a true exception.
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