T COS the 13 different ways the sound "sh" can be written: i 6 shoe sugar ocean issue nation schist pshaw suspicion nauseous conscious chaperone mansion fuchsia International Paper asked John Irving, author of "The World According to Garp," "The Hotel New Hampshire," and "Set- ting Free the Bears, " among other novels- and once a hopelessly bad speller himself- to teach you how to improve your spelling. Let's begin with the bad news. If youre a bad speller, you probably think you always will be. There are exceptions to every spelling rule, and the rules them- selves are easy to forget. George Bernard Shaw demonstrated how ridiculous some spelling rules are. By following the rules, he said, we could spell fish this way: ghoti. The "f' as it sounds in enough, the "i" as it sounds in women, and the "sh" as it sounds in fiction. With such rules to follow, no one should feel stupid for being a bad speller. But there are ways to improve. Start by acknowledg- ing the mess that English spelling is in-but have sympathy: English spelling changed with foreign influences. Chaucer wrote "gesse," but "guess," imported earlier by the Norman invaders, finally replaced it. Most early printers in England came from Holland; they brought "ghost" and "gherkin" with them. If you'd like to intimidate your- self-and remain a bad speller forever-just try to remember Now the good news The good news is that 90 per- cent of all writing consists of 1,000 basic words. There is, also, a method to most English spelling and a great number of how-to-spell books. Remarkably, all these books propose learning the same rules! Not surprisingly, most of these books are humorless. Just keep this in mind: If you're familiar with the words you use, you'll probably spell them cor- rectly-and you shouldn't be writ- ing words you're unfamiliar with anyway. USE a word-out loud, and more than once-before you try writing it, and make sure (with a new word) that you know what it means before you use it. This means you'll have to look it up in a dictionary, where you'll not only learn what it means, but you'll see how it's spelled. Choose a dictionary you enjoy browsing in, and guard it as you would a diary. You wouldn't lend a diary, would you? Beside every word I look up more than once, I write a note to myself -about WHY I looked it up. I have looked up "strictly" 14 times since 1964. I prefer to spell it with a k- as in "stricktly." I have looked up "ubiquitous" a dozen times. I can't remember what it means. Another good way to use your g dictionary: When you have to look up a word, for any reason, learn- and learn to spell-a new word at the same time. It can be any useful word on the same page as the word you looked up. Put the date beside this new word and see how quickly, or in what way, you forget it. Even- tually, you'll learn it. Almost as important as know- ing what a word means (in order to spell it) is knowing how it's pro- nounced. It's government, not goverment. It's February, not Febuary. And if you know that anti- means against, you should know how to spell antidote and antibiotic and antifreeze. If you know that ante- means before, you shouldn't have trouble spelling antechamber or antecedent. Some rules, exceptions, and two tricks I don't have room to touch on all the rules here. It would take a book to do that. But I can share a few that help me most: What about -ary or . -ery? When a word has a primary accent on the first syllable and a secondary accent on the next-to-last syllable (sec're- tar'y), it usu- ally ends in t -ary. Only six impor-g tant words like this end in -ery: "Love your dictionary."