When I was still teaching, I had many cautionary tales for my students. An overhead transparency that I always put up and discussed as term paper time approached was the poem below. While spelling is important for understanding, there is no substitute for the writer’s OWN careful checking. Never trust Microsoft to get it right!

Eye Halve a Spelling Chequer

Eye halve a spelling chequer

It came with my pea sea

It plainly marques four my revue

Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word

And weight four it two say

Weather eye am wrong oar write

It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid

It nose bee fore two long

And eye can put the error rite

Its rarely ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it

I am shore your pleased two no

Its letter perfect in it’s weigh

My chequer tolled me sew.

–––Sauce unknown

Were I still teaching, I would probably add the Youtube video below to my cautionary tale portfolio. I know that I could never pull it off in a live performance myself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjhOBiSk8Gg

Loved your post, it is so on target. I don't know how many times I have had to leave the computer to look up a word in the old analog dictionary because my spelling of a word was so bad the spell checker didn't have a clue what word I was trying to type. Have a great day.

Charis (imported) wrote: Mon Apr 21, 2008 8:05 am Loved your post, it is so on target. I don't know how many times I have had to leave the computer to look up a word in the old analog dictionary because my spelling of a word was so bad the spell checker didn't have a clue what word I was trying to type. Have a great day.

I for one, thank you for going to the effort. Even this message board has a spell checker, and it's actually not bad.

I saw one program about most embarassing mistakes at work. This one very English woman explained that she typed out a memo that was sent to every employee saying, "All employees will sit for company photos Tuesday." In her very proper accent, she added, "Did you realize that spell checker will not find it when you accidentally insert an "h" in "sit."

Shit!

You're right.

Then again, after 2 bottles of Jesus' FINE RED WINE, who the f*ck cares?

Nice thread this on a subject close to my heart. Undoubtedly the best spell checker in the world is the writer himself.

I can guarantee to pick up at least five mistakes per thousand words in any document I produce but only after it has been posted, or submitted, or printed and bound.

Prior to that the document was perfect.

Kortpeel (imported) wrote: Tue Apr 22, 2008 2:15 am Nice thread this on a subject close to my heart. Undoubtedly the best spell checker in the world is the writer himself.

I can guarantee to pick up at least five mistakes per thousand words in any document I produce but only after it has been posted, or submitted, or printed and bound.

Prior to that the document was perfect.

Damn! The very same thing hapens tom e all thet ime! If you check my posts here, you will notise the foot mote at the bottom of allmost all of them "Last edited: m/d/y Reason: spelling misteaks."

Very strange, how printed words, dry ink, can CHANGE. Formely perfectly speled words will transform tehmselfes into a bunch of incomrehensible gibberish whenever I mail a resumee, or post something reelly important.

Charis (imported) wrote: Mon Apr 21, 2008 8:05 am Loved your post, it is so on target. I don't know how many times I have had to leave the computer to look up a word in the old analog dictionary because my spelling of a word was so bad the spell checker didn't have a clue what word I was trying to type. Have a great day.

I find that if I try several different phonetic spellings, the spell checker can usually guess the correct word.

Also, some spell checkers are better than others at guessing the correct word. Agent 4.2 is better than NoteTab 4.9 and Microsoft Bookshelf 1996 is better than Agent.

I have had times when the word was in the program's dictionary and I had the first six letters of the word correct but the program could not guess the correct word.

I never use a paper dictionary because I have four programs with dictionaries in them installed on my computer.

Did you know that there are free dictionaries on the web? If you use FireFox, (a free browser with a spell checker that thinks "FireFox" is misspelled) you can go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... ?sort=name and add some.