Spell Checking

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TILL
Gee, Brian, do you really believe you are telling us something we didn't
know? Yet nothing you said removes the fact that if you had used a spell
checker, it would have caught your misspelling of "grammar."  I use a spell
checker on every posting that I send, but after running the spell checker, I
also proofread the text from beginning to end.  I do this to catch the
places where I have carelessly put "to" for "too" and such like.  This is a
procedure that I recommend not just to you but everybody.

BRIDEAN
In the example above I misspelled "dollar" as "dolor". This is close enough to
an actual example where I actually (not intentionally) misspelled a word and
the spell checker did not catch it.  In other words, a spell checker might not
catch your errors because to the spell checker they are not really errors.
And the errors it does catch, might not be errors.

BRIDEAN
*snip*

>So the spell checker detected 18 words misspelled that were actually correctly

>spelled.  And this is in a document that is not much more than a page long.


TILL
Maybe you don't have a good spell checker, because my spell checker will now
recognize everyone of those words as correct spellings.  That's because I
took your message and ran a spell check on it.  Each time it stopped on one
of the above terms, I hit the "add" option, and the word was added to the
dictionary on my spell check program.  Over time, any spell checker with
this option can be upgraded so that specialized words like these will be
recognized as correct spellings.

BRIDEAN
I could do that, I am aware of that.  The problem is, do I really want to add it
to the dictionary?  An example I can think of at the top of my head is one time
I wrote a sci fi story with a character by the name of Elzoog.  Now Elzoog came
from the planet Toomuc.  Your spell checker would catch Toomuc as being
a misspelled word.  Let's say I add it to my dictionary.  Later on I hastily write
something like " I paid toomuc money for that steak yesterday."  This is
somewhat of an artificial example but you see my point.  If I then add "sh"
"csh" and the like then the spell checker's behavior becomes somewhat more
unpredictable because sometimes it might see two letters of a word as being
a word in and of itself.  An example would be any word with a hyphen in it.

Also, perhaps I really don't know the spelling of a word and the spell checker
gives me some inane suggestions.  Usually these are long and slightly
unusual words such as anacronism or polyhydroplaning, or something like
that.  If it is long and unusual enough I won't know how to spell it either, so
I hit the ignore button.


TILL
Why not hit the "add" button instead so that on the next encounter, the
checker will recognize the word as a correct spelling?  If you had used a
spell checker, it would have told you that you misspelled "hitting" in your
last sentence above.

BRIDEAN
How long did the spell checker take before it got there though?

TILL
What I am really trying to say is that I don't understand the laziness of
writers who won't take the time to check their work for accuracy.  Before I
stopped teaching writing, most students were using computers to write their
essays, yet I found that an astounding number of them wouldn't take the time
to use spell checking before they submitted their papers.  

BRIDEAN
I can see it for IMPORTANT stuff like resumes or English papers for a college
English course.  I do not see it for stuff sent to the errancy list.  The reason 
why is that it is more IMPORTANT to be understood on such a list than to
have correct English grammar.

TILL
Doing so would have caught most of the spelling and typographical errors, 
but they didn't have enough concern to take the minute that would be 
necessary to run the spell-check option.  

BRIDEAN
A minute?!  I think it took me close to three minutes to go through my resume
with the spell checker.  But let's say you have a really fast spell checker that
can check a post like this in a minute.  You yourself said that you get about
100 posts a day.  To run the spell checker on each of these posts would then
take an hour and forty minutes.  This is more time than I spend merely going
through my mail, reading what I am interested in, discarding what I am not
interested in, and then responding to posts that I feel I have a response to.
Perhaps in your retirement you don't have anything else to do.  I however
have other things I would like to do.  I care more about whether my posts are
understandable than I do that they are not grammatical.  

TILL
I also taught my students how to use the search-and-find option in most wordprocessing
programs to help them catch places where they have 
inadvertently used "their" for "there" and such like. If a search is done for 
"their," the program cursor will stop every time this word appears in the text.  
The writer can then read the sentence to make sure that he has not used "their" where
"there" is needed.  After all usages of this word have been checked, 
the writer can then have search-and-find do the same for "there" and "to" and 
"too," etc.  The result of just a few minutes effort like this will be a written work 
that is much "cleaner" than it would otherwise be, yet most people don't care 
enough to bother.  I really don't understand this attitude.  We have a wonderful
technology available to help us improve our writing, and we won't use it.

BRIDEAN
Ok, actually sit down and time how long it takes you to search for "their", "there",
"to", "too", "two", ect. in this particular post.  Multiply that amount of time by
100 and you will get how long it would take to do this with ALL of the posts that
you get.  As the saying goes, "necessity is the mother of invention" I would add
that "necessity is the mother of usefulness".  If someone does not see perfect
English grammar and spelling necessary for an e-mail discussion group, then
they are not going to USE the tools to achieve that kind of end.

Now if perfect English grammar and spelling are important to YOU then I can
understand that since you were once an English teacher.  I am not an English
teacher nor do I make any living off of my talents in English (I would be a pauper
if I did).  I am an average computer programmer with a BS degree in Mathematics.
That is my background.  Even so I usually don't get on people's case over
mathematical errors they make.  But for some reason, English teachers always
seem to have a need to get on people's case about grammar, spelling, ect.
Why is this?

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