[General] How to ....?

jiaruchan said:

In colloquial English, is it acceptable to start a sentence like:

How to spell the word 'Singapore'? RATHER THAN How do you spell the word 'Singapore'?

Thank you.

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emsr2d2 said:

It depends. If you were using it as the title of an article, for instance, you could use your first sentence:

HOW TO SPELL THE WORD "SINGAPORE"

In this article, I am going to explain why some people find it difficult to spell Singapore...... etc etc.

However, it is not suitable as a sentence on its own within a piece of writing.

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jiaruchan said:

My cousin told me that his English teacher would say 'How to spell it?' when she ordered the students to spell a word for her as a learning practice. I told him she should have used 'How do you spell it?' instead. Do you think I am right in this case?

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emsr2d2 said:

I totally agree with you. The teacher could either ask "How do you spell.....?" or, as an order "Spell.......", but "How to spell it?" is incorrect!
Can I assume his teacher was not a native English speaker?

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jiaruchan said:

The teacher is Chinese like me.

When I asked my cousin to spell a word for me, I said 'how do you spell...?', and he told me his teacher did not say it the way as I did. It was just 'how to spell...?'. That prompted me to post this thread. Thank you for the help.

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Raymott said:

I had a recent campaign about this.
The fact is that "How to do something?" is a common "question" here, but is not proper English. It is so common that it probably doesn't register to some readers as being wrong.
A native speaker would never say/write "How to use <word>" unless, as emsr2d2 says, it's a heading. But in that case, it's neither a question nor a sentence.

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"How to do something?" is a common "question".

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tedtmc said:

This is actually a literal translation from Chinese. It is also common in Malaysia and Singapore.

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