The following words are frequent favorites to trick up the test taker.  They are pronounced the same or very similarly but are spelled differently.  For test takers who read aloud, these are meant to trip you up!  There are literally hundreds of these types of words but we’ve picked out the ones that appear most frequently in government writing.

Look at them carefully and memorize their meanings and differences.  A trick to memorization is memorizing one by attaching it to something memorable such as thinking “her three little pigs” for the three letters in ses (her).  Then when you read something and it sounds like ces but isn’t ces, then it is probably something else so your brain gets alerted to a potential question trick.  This way you don’t have to memorize all the words, just half.

We’ve also mixed up the order of the words rather than putting them in alphabetical order as this helps with memorization.