Spelling checkers

I've mentioned before that I prefer the term “spelling checker” for software that checks spelling; a “spell checker” would be something that checks spells, more useful to sorcerers and shamans than to those seeking sterling orthography.

But I find overreliance on spelling checkers, regardless of what one calls them, to be disturbing. It might surprise you to know, as you read these missives and find few spelling errors, that I never check them for correct spelling with software. I check them the old way: by proofreading them.

Ah, you say, how quaint, how... how 20th-century. But, see, when I do that, I find and fix the few spelling errors that are there before you see them. And I also fix the occasional grammatical error. And the odd & end wrong word, something that would pass the spelling checker just fine, but that I'm glad to catch.

Perhaps most important of all, by re-reading it with a critical eye, I find things that I decide I'd like to say a little differently, clarify something that's not quite worded right, soften something that now seems to be a bit stronger than I'd meant it.

In other words, I think my blog entries are better for it.

It also seems to me that as writers of all sorts have increased their use of these tools, there's much less proofreading going on, and much of the writing I see — in newspapers, in magazines, on the web, in email, in technical papers — is worse for that. Proofreading accomplishes more than making sure things are spelled correctly, but the ability to check spelling automatically has made some writers ignore the other benefits of proofreading in an attempt to save effort and money. I wonder, sometimes, whether newspapers even employ copy editors any more.

Back in 1988, an IBM colleague posted a comment to a discussion in which someone else had been criticized for not having used PROOF, a spelling checker we then had available, to avoid misspellings in his comments. Here's what he had to say:

Just to be safe, I PROOFed this one before appending (with apologies to L. Carroll).

 
Teas broiling and the silty tomes
Did gyrate and gamble in the wave
All misery were the boroughs
And the mime rashes outraged

Beware my son the Jabberer
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch
Beware the Jujitsu bird
And shun the furious Bantering

He took his voracity sword in hand
Long time the maximal foe he sought
So rested he by the Tom*Tom tree
And stood awhile in thought

And as in Irish thought he stood
The Jabberer with eyes of flame
Came waffling through the Tulsa wood
And burbled as it came

One! Two! One! Two!
The voracity blade went snicker snack
He left it dead, and with its head
He went glamoring back

“Hats thou slain the Jabberer?
Come to my arms my bleakish boy!
Oh farmhouse day, calculi, canary!”
He chortled in his joy.

Teas broiling and the silty tomes
Did gyrate and gamble in the wave
All misery were the boroughs
And the mime rashes outraged
 

I obviously take no responsibility for spelling, punctuation, grammar, etc., etc.

---- David S.