FYI.....Spelling

FYI.....Spelling error.....

Publisher's Musings.....

"MRH forum member mad a prediction in 2015"

POTB award?

Spellcheck, like gravity, is no one's friend

If it's a real word in any language in your software's dictionary, it passes spellcheck.  One of the most frustrating things I found as a tech writer was when someone at the document publishing software company screwed up and embedded a typo in the dictionary and the package made it into distribution.  If I had a dollar for every time I had to do a manual search for the word "fo" and replace it with "of",  I could have taken a trip to Hawaii.  And yes, it took until the next major release (about two years) after the bug was discovered and reported before the company fixed it.  And, no, you couldn't do a global search and replace because of some other obscure bug, so it was a manual search, replace, search, replace....  

The only saving grace was that there weren't that many times one of the writers would slip and make the typo, but every file had to be checked, and we had dozens of files in each document.  

Janet N.

Instead of ignore hit learn

Instead of ignore hit learn and it will know it next time it sees it.

Dan

Problem with using "learn" instead of "ignore" with spellcheck

... is that frequently (in my experience), what's an acronym or abbreviation in one document is also a typo everywhere else in the world.  Once you hit "learn" and add it to your dictionary, the software will automatically accept all future occurrences of those learned words at face value, and you've just created a huge headache for yourself. (Ask me how I know...)   A workaround, but usually more trouble than just hitting "ignore" repeatedly, is to manually go in and edit the dictionary afterward, which may take some hoops to do if the software publisher didn't think of this necessity beforehand.  This has happened with more than one publishing program I've used over the years.

And you're still stuck with proofing all those occurrences anyway.  For example, what happens if you accept  "ACR" as valid, thinking, yeah, I see those marks for Atlantic Coast Railroad all over this article - and suddenly all the three typos for the word car in the article get blindly swallowed as OK by the dictionary because there's no way to specify case for dictionary entries. Whoops.

There's no real easy way around it.  Even grammar programs still have some difficulty with edge case uses in fields that weren't the primary target for those programs.

Janet N.

Learn a bad idea

Grammarly

The Grammarly software does a superior job compared to ordinary spell checkers, as it’s based on machine learning techniques. The Pro version is well worth the price. I do legal work for them and have visited their R&D center in Kyiv, Ukraine, which has some of the world’s most talented research linguists and data scientists. Impressive.

Spelling

I f you think RRese can give spellcheck a headache, try using it on medical articles. I have been a secretary and record keeper for medical services. Also done some legal wording for them also. Boy does a spellcheck go goofy about every ten words or less. Remember this:

Spellcheck is your worst enema! enemy.