The Mechanics

Good morning to you all. Today is mechanics day and it's spell-check day.

Spell-checking programs help you eliminate misspelled words at the proofreading stage and they can be great for finding specific words in your document. You can use the 'search' feature and find specific words in your document and 'replace' them with another word. I used this a lot when I worked in-house. The first time I found a word that didn't conform to our style guide I would simply 'find' and 'replace' it with the correctly spelled word. Then I knew that word had been corrected throughout the document.

Spell-checking programs do have drawbacks however and it is really important to be aware of them:

1. Spell-checking programs cannot detect the omission of words.
2. They do not flag correctly spelled words that are incorrect in a specific context, for example Ewe bake too manly arrows, as opposed to You make too many errors.
3. Unless the spell-checker is part of a larger grammar-checking program they do not identify words that are grammatically wrong. For example, the sentence He do not understands, would not be flagged.
4. There is one caveat to the search-and-replace function that is important to know. If you change a word such as honor to honour in the search-and-replace function you will automatically create misspellings of other related words, such as honorific, honorary and so on. This will require you to go into the document manually and change each instance of the newly misspelled words.

It's important to remember that though spell-checkers are great tools they do not negate the need for experienced editors and proofreaders.

I have had people ask me, when I was commenting on the poorly edited Montreal Gazette, well don't spell-check programs fix that? In this case the question was about a verb and its subject not being in agreement, as was the case in the Gazette. I said: No, spell-checkers do not check for grammar errors. The look on the person's face was of the blank-stare variety. It was obviously news to them.

Fair enough, not everyone is a writer or has to use word processing programs for their work.

But it also helped me understand why so many materials are published without being properly edited. Some people do believe that a spell-checker is all they need.

I am here to say, though spell-checkers are great tools, they do not guarantee a grammatically correct document. In fact, you can end up with Ewes baking too manly arrows, so watch out!