Type your report, run the spelling checker, and let ’er rip!
Just don’t act surprised when you pull the page out of the printer tray and find your carefully thought out prose riddled with errors.
Too many people nowadays think running a spelling checker will relieve them of the burden of proofing. To illustrate just one way a spelling checker can let you down, let me reprint a poem I ran across recently.
Human Brain Not Yet Obsolete
I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC;
It plainly marks four my revue
Mistakes I cannot sea.
I’ve run this poem threw it,
I’m sure your please too no,
Its letter perfect in it’s weigh,
My checker tolled me sew.
—Arthur unknown
It’s not easy to proof your own work. When you finish proofing, it’s not a bad idea to get someone else to look over your work. A fresh pair of eyes can see things you may have overlooked.
Nothing ever happens perfectly the first time around and it’s normal to find errors. Even after a careful proofing, things can slip by. Here some things to look for.
(subhead) Typical problems
Besides homonyms as shown in the poem above, checkers also miss misspellings which result in legitimate words, such as the transposition, from and form (very common). An added letter, as in country instead of county (also very common) can hugely change the meaning of a sentence, and the reader won’t even know she’s run across a typo.
Another type of mistake you must proof to find, is the mix-up of the s, d, and r keys on verbs, like provides, provided, and provider. I think these errors happen in the brain, not the fingers.
Of course, check dates and other figures, as well as proper names your checker doesn’t know.
Unrelated to spelling are ‘leave outs,’ which are whole lines of manuscript that accidentally get skipped when typing; and repeated lines. These jump out when you proof, because suddenly the material doesn’t make any sense. Again, the spell checker won’t catch these.
Many spell checkers don’t care about capitals, and won’t notice if you forgot to capitalize California, or if you’re heavy handed, and don’t get off the shift key in time and type CAlifornia.
(subhead) Use a spell checker anyway
Now don’t get me wrong. In my graphic arts business, we run spell checkers on spell checkers. To begin with, we use Thunder, an interactive spell checker, when we type. (Thunder comes with a proper name dictionary and also alerts you of capitalization mistakes and double words. You can add your own words to a supplementary dictionary.) Then I proof the text. With misspellings already taken care of by Thunder, I can more easily check for all the preceding problems.
After the text gets formatted and made into pages, I proof for positioning to make sure everything is in the right place. I also check for bad line breaks and other typographically offensive things. And finally, I run XPress’ spell checker, because lots can happen in the page make-up process.
Perfection the first time through only matters in a live musical concert. At the computer keyboard, we have the luxury of going over our work with a fine toothed comb. A pianist can lay an egg on stage for everyone to see, but in typesetting, we have every opportunity to achieve perfection before going public. Remember, a mistake isn’t a mistake unless you fail to catch it.
