Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Spell Check: Both a Blessing and a Curse

I can honestly say I am quite possibly the worst speller in the world save for my Mom and Husband. I have gotten better with time and practice, but I will never be one of those people that can stand up in even a small group and win a spelling contest. As a child my spelling was so bad that when I told my teacher in second grade (this was before personal computers were common place) I wanted to be a writer she laughed at me. I digress though.
My Blessing- I use spell check all the time. It’s little red X reminding me that I have made yet another mistake. It is wonderful when I have misspelled tiem, oh I mean time, for the sixteenth time it will still catch it. This is a wonderful thing.
My Curse- I hate that spell check won’t let me know things are spelled wrong.  Obviously, it’s not really important that angel is a-n-g-e-l instead of a-n-g-l-e J.
Spell check is not foolproof. It may correct many mistakes, but there are many more that it can’t catch, or errors that aren’t errors at all. This is where editing comes into play.

3 comments:

  1. Spellcheck is a pain in the butt sometimes. I am a bad speller too and nothing beats a good editor to help find those.

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  2. My favorite moments are the ones you can slap yourself for, like writing the word ferry when you meant to write fairy. I actually pitched that to an agent in an online pitch fest. I still have a red mark on my forehead. I'm going to invent stupid check, I swear I am.

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  3. Spell check is no good substitute for an editor. Having just read Immortal, I found a large number of rather glaring errors that brought my eyes to a screeching halt. You have a problem with extraneous use of apostrophes (you do not use them on any plurals... Ever...) it's 'faux-pas', you misused a few words to boot, and you use the same descriptive phrases over and over again. I am loath to hear about the corner of anyone's mouth again.

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