Beginning of Essay
It is unusual and perhaps impossible for an emigre’s native language to remain unaffected after living abroad for several years. Phonetic and spelling rules that may have been drilled into their minds in childhood quickly disappear while the emigre struggle ....

Middle of Essay
.... test the interference of English phonetic rules on Russian spelling. This phenomenon captured my attention three years ago, while I was living with a Russian emigre student. I would ask her to correct my Russian homework each night, but she often corrected my homework rather poorly, as her spelling was less than stellar. She claimed that since leaving the Soviet Union 6 years earlier, she had only spoken Russian and having almost no reason to write in Russian, she had forgotten some of the most basic spelling rules. Further, she claimed that spelling in Russian was different than spelling in English. This last comment puzzled me until I lived in ....