Letter Perfect

Spell check lets you add words to your custom spell-check dictionary that aren’t found in the standard dictionary. Once added, spell check skips over them, accepting their spelling as is. If you use unusual  words a lot – those that may be common in your business or with a particular client – then this feature is especially useful. But it’s also easy to inadvertently add words that are, in fact, spelled incorrectly. It may be that at the moment the spelling - however unusual - works for whatever it is you are doing, or that you’re working so fast that you accidentally click “add word” when going through the spell-check process. (This is easy to do when spell checking a long document.) Once added, however, these words may never be caught by the spell checker again. To avoid this problem you need to erase your custom dictionary every few months. This will allow the spell checker to catch those misspelled words in the future. Here’s how to do it: Go to “tools” and click “options” Choose “spelling and grammar” and then “custom dictionaries” Follow the prompts to complete the modification Remember, spell checks do not distinguish between homonyms - words that sound the same but are spelled differently, like bare and bear, their and they’re, current and currant, and gorilla and guerrilla (that last mistake is more common than you’d think). And they aren't mind readers either. Spell checkers don't know you meant to type the word  "same" when you typed "sane," which is a typo I just caught while writing this post. Spell checkers are important tools, but they are not substitutes for good, old-fashioned proofreading.

Comments

[BethR]

"Spell checkers are important tools, but they are not substitutes for good, old-fashioned proofreading."

Here, here!

Why are the proofreaders and copy editors the first people to be let go from any publishing organization?

[Dan]

Why are the proofreaders and copy editors the first people to be let go from any publishing organization? Probably because they're being let go by people on the business side and not the editorial side.

[Jonathan Saw]

You can also delete words from the dictionary. This is very helpful for commonly misspelled words that could cause great embarrassment -- for example, I deleted the words "public" and "pubic" from the dictionary. This allows me to be sure I use the right word every time I do work in PUBLIC relations.