Optimal Swill (or, Don't Trust the Spell Checker)
At one point in my life, I worked as a secretary in a university departmental office. One of my duties was to proofread and (to some extent) edit papers, exams, etc. that the professors wrote. I'm fairly good at this, so that was no problem. However, once a professor sent me a paper he'd been working on, asking me to look it over. I did so, fixed a few points of grammar and punctuation, then came to a section that read "optimal swill of the soul suet." I looked at that, tried to deconstruct it, and could not come up with any reason why a professor would want that in a paper he was intending to submit to an upper-tier academic journal. So when I saw him the next day, I asked him what on earth it meant. He looked at it, looked puzzled, went back a page, went forward a page, and then said, "I have no idea what I was trying to say there. It should all be correct; I ran the paper through a spell checker before I sent it to you."
A light went on in my mind. "Did you accept the first word the spell checker suggested?"
He did have the good grace to look sheepish. "Yes."
"From now on, let me fix the spelling."
I teased him about optimal swill for the next several years.
The moral of this story is, don't trust your word processor's spell checker unless you absolutely know what word you want. If it gives you suggestions, check them over carefully. Don't accept whatever word the program brings up first, blithely thinking that of course the werp knows best! Because it's just a piece of software. It can't look at the context of your sentence (even the word processors with the so-called grammar checkers) and tell what word you really want. You could end up with optimal swill, and the editor to whom you send your paper or story will not be as amused as I was.
I have seen what were probably spell checker errors in published books. I wish I had written them down; the only one I remember is "librarian" where it should have said "barbarian." I laughed out loud over that one, you may be sure!
The spell checker can be a great tool; I take notice of the little green squiggles under words in my documents. But the spell checker does not have the final say on my manuscripts. I proofread the entire manuscript myself to assure I catch errors like "the" for "they," or "one" for "once," where even though I left a letter out of the word, the incorrect word is still a real word.
But, you say, "I'm not a great speller. I need the spell checker!" My answer to that is yes, use the spell checker, but assure that it's not the only tool you use to assure your writing is correct. If you're in a critique group, there is probably at least one member who compulsively fixes every typo (in my group, there are two; I'm one of them). If not, do you have a friend with better spelling skills who can go over your document? A second pair of eyes checking the manuscript for accuracy is critical for writing of any sort.
A light went on in my mind. "Did you accept the first word the spell checker suggested?"
He did have the good grace to look sheepish. "Yes."
"From now on, let me fix the spelling."
I teased him about optimal swill for the next several years.
The moral of this story is, don't trust your word processor's spell checker unless you absolutely know what word you want. If it gives you suggestions, check them over carefully. Don't accept whatever word the program brings up first, blithely thinking that of course the werp knows best! Because it's just a piece of software. It can't look at the context of your sentence (even the word processors with the so-called grammar checkers) and tell what word you really want. You could end up with optimal swill, and the editor to whom you send your paper or story will not be as amused as I was.
I have seen what were probably spell checker errors in published books. I wish I had written them down; the only one I remember is "librarian" where it should have said "barbarian." I laughed out loud over that one, you may be sure!
The spell checker can be a great tool; I take notice of the little green squiggles under words in my documents. But the spell checker does not have the final say on my manuscripts. I proofread the entire manuscript myself to assure I catch errors like "the" for "they," or "one" for "once," where even though I left a letter out of the word, the incorrect word is still a real word.
But, you say, "I'm not a great speller. I need the spell checker!" My answer to that is yes, use the spell checker, but assure that it's not the only tool you use to assure your writing is correct. If you're in a critique group, there is probably at least one member who compulsively fixes every typo (in my group, there are two; I'm one of them). If not, do you have a friend with better spelling skills who can go over your document? A second pair of eyes checking the manuscript for accuracy is critical for writing of any sort.