The Hazards of Spell Checkers
Spell checkers can be wonderful things, when they are used properly, but overreliance on them can create a whole new set of problems! The following are all real examples of the misuse of spell checkers that I have run across.
Pay attention to what the spell checker is recommending.
When I was working for the Provincial government, I discovered that a co-worker had created a form letter with "Hamilton, Entire" in the return address, because the spell checker didn’t recognize "Ontario" and suggested "Entire" as an alternative. I don’t know how many copies of that letter went out.
Don’t trust the spell checker to catch all your mistakes.
Just because the word you’ve typed was found in the dictionary doesn’t mean you’ve typed the correct word. I can’t even guess how many resumes I’ve seen where the job applicant is looking for work or has experience as a "manger" or in "costumer service."
Be careful when using the "add to dictionary" function.
If you accidentally add a word that is spelled incorrectly, it will never again be caught by the spell checker. If you’re anything like me, you’re apt to make the same typing mistakes over and over, so this can be a real problem, and to fix it, you’ll need to figure out how to edit your user dictionary.
I was recently working in Office 2007 when I noticed that the spell checker did not catch one of my mistakes. There was no way that what I’d typed was a dictionary word, so I was really puzzled why this had happened. Then a couple of days ago I got an interesting message on my screen from Microsoft - in order to improve their product they wanted my permission to add words I’d added to my dictionary to their master dictionary. It gave me the option of seeing what those words were, and I declined, because I could see that some of them were simply sentence fragments I’d chosen to ignore (as opposed to adding to the dictionary) which would be of no value to anyone. But this made me think that perhaps the uncaught error was the result of some other user saying, yes sure, take my words, when they had actually added spelling mistakes to the dictionary.
It just goes to show that a spell checker is dangerous in the wrong hands!
Bottom line - it never hurts to get someone else to take a look at your work, especially in the case of important documents. Even good spellers and proficient keyboarders make mistakes, and it’s often difficult to spot your own errors, because your mind already knows what it should say, so that’s what it sees.
