Why You Should Never Trust Spell Check

I have a love/hate relationship with Spell Check. I love it because I'm a very good speller, but a horrible typist. Before the days of this brilliant invention, I would have to hunt and peck very slowly to make sure that everything came out correctly, having no instinctive feel for keyboarding, which was a frustrating damper on my creative flow, I'll tell ya. But now I can go hell-bent for leather (I don't even know what that means-did Judas Priest make that up?) and when I come up for air, all of my typos are helpfully underlined in red. 

But here's the hate part: Sometimes typos are still real words. If you leave an 'o' off of 'too', replace the 'c' in 'cough' with a 'd', or transpose the vowels in 'lion', your Spell Check is not going to see it as a mistake. Also, sometimes misspelled words are still real words. If you leave the 'u' out of fourth or have a homophonic brainlapse and write 'accept' when you meant 'except', who is Spell Check to kick about it? Nobody, that's who.

Here's one more reason not to trust it to do your proofreading for you: proper nouns and made-up words. When you know Spell Check won't recognize the spelling of a proper name (Smith, no problem; Nkwoze, problem) or a silly word you made up for 'flavor', it's easy to ignore the red underlines, but what if you still managed to misspell the thing? Mr. Nkwoze might feel slighted if he sees his name as Knowze and people think he's Beyonce's dad. (I know it's Knowles. Don't write in.) For example, I initially typed the non-standard 'brainlapse' as 'brianlapse'. If I had bypassed giving it a once-over simply because I knew Spell Check couldn't handle it, I might have left people with the impression that I would be a better writer but for lack of Brian. (I miss you, Brian! Call me!)

The moral of the story is: Spell Check is a tool, not a contractor. Before you send your creations out into the world, give them a good read or even have someone else read them (frequently we will miss our own mistakes because we already know what we're trying to say, but they will pop out at someone else). Heck, read 'em twice. It's called editing. I know some errors will still get through (I was aghast at seeing a typo in the title of a story I did that was featured on the front page of Yahoo, so I'm no stranger to public humiliation), but we do our best.

Free use image from Pixabay https://pixabay.com/en/keyboard-computer-keys-white-886462/