Spellcheck is many people’s favourite tool when writing; it’s great for picking out niggly spelling and grammatical errors. However, what it’s less good at is spotting words used out of context. If it’s in the dictionary, it’s deemed ‘acceptable’.
So you get odd things happening at times, such as articles where the writer has obviously become confused by two homonyms, and the results come out something like these (the below come from a Digital Tutors blog post about the game engines Unity and Unreal):
one engine might rain supreme
And this particularly poorly structured sentence – who are its ‘dominants’, exactly? The people who’ve been oppressing a game engine?
When it comes to mobile games that is where Unity really shows its dominants, with many popular mobile games created with it, it’s really become a mobile developers go-to game engine.
Finally, the penultimate paragraph has this recommendation:
Put them through the ringer and try to figure out what works best for you.
(Thanks to my husband for pointing me in the direction of this article.)
It’s not necessarily all the writer’s fault for not spotting errors, though. If you’re not 100% sure that you’re correct, you might get tripped up by the (presumably rigorously tested) spellcheck tool in MS Word 2013. During my last editing job, I kept seeing that lovely squiggly underline and the suggestion that I might want to replace a (correctly used) ‘its’ with ‘it’s’. If it’s suggesting a change to you that you suspect is incorrect, it’s always best to reach for a copy of a grammar guide or dictionary to confirm your suspicions, or to visit a reliable website (I tend to use
Oxford Dictionaries for consistency).
My phone seems to also be determined to trip me up on a regular basis, merrily autocorrecting, so that if I try and respond too quickly to an email or text it might come out either as gibberish or just wrong. And it looks pretty poor if an editor doesn’t know her stuff! The two that recently caught me out were:
1. While using my phone when out and about to email a translator I’m working with, I had a query about the plural of ‘raki’. However, Autocorrect decided to do this:
I can’t find the plural of raki as takes, only rakilar in the nominative and rakilari in the accusative.
No wonder she emailed me back asking for further clarification!
2. When texting my sister recently, it decided to edit my message to
Is the HV address you’re current one? Can’t remember!
Luckily it was a family member rather than a client that time…
I guess the lesson to take away from this week’s post is to always double-check if you’re not convinced the machine’s suggestion is right, and to read your texts carefully before you send them. Soon you’ll end up like me – worrying that a potential customer will spot a typo in a two-year-old Facebook status update and decide not to hire you…
(Thanks to Huffington Post’s article ‘The 45 Funniest Autocorrect Fails‘ for the image accompanying this blog post.)
spellegance 