​I’m revisiting that old chestnut: the howling limitations of spell check.   In the course of my work I complement my beady eye with two ancillary proofreading tools: pre-installed spell check and Intelligent Editing’s excellent editorial package PerfectIt. They enable me to increase my productivity, which is good for me and good for my clients. However, they should not be used in place of a proofreader. ​

​Spell check fails to:
Correct simple typos:
. Apple clearly thought it could improve upon in.
. Churchill favoured a boiler suit with amble pockets and escape hatches.
. I’m not afraid of aging.
. I thought it best to give him a wide birth.
 Spot a missing letter:
. Give one of our consultant a call.
Spot a missing word:
. It about being flexible.
Spot when a plural is required:
. I believe it’s time to rein thing in.
Spot when two words should be one:
. He was scare mongering.
Put the full stop in the correct place in direct speech:
. He said, “That’s it! I’m leaving”.
Put the full stop in the correct place:
. No fly posting offenders will be prosecuted.
Use upper and lowercase correctly:
. Julio Cesar called it a “Supermarket ball”.
Spot troublesome compounds:
. We are already to leave.
 
Checkers don’t know when to hyphenate a phrase that is used to qualify another noun:
. … in a business focused environment.
Checkers don’t know that adverbs used in compound words in front of a noun should be hyphenated:
. …much needed haircut.
 
Checkers have a rudimentary grasp of grammar:
. The duck and me went for a walk.
. The pudding needed less apples and fewer sugar.
 
Spell check is often foxed by UK vs US spelling variants:
. On the whole, US spelling shortens and simplifies: color, harbor, honor.
. However, there are exceptions: US fulfill, instill : UK fulfil, instil.
 
Checkers don’t reliably correct numbers written in letters and numerals:
. You should use letters when writing 1 to 9, and numerals from ten onwards.
 
Proofreaders and copy-editors need a decent grasp of general knowledge, which checkers don’t have:
. “…elephants in The Gambia”. This West African country doesn’t have elephants. The author meant to say Uganda.
. “…the Magna Carta”. Magna Carta does not take the definite article.
. “European High Court of Justice”. It is the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).
 
So I thought I’d test my grammar/spell checkers:
. i thort i saw a pussy cat their on the stare
became
. I thought I saw a pussy cat they’re on the state.
Hopeless.
 
And finally… “proofreader”
Spell check says this form is incorrect. The Society for Editors and Proofreaders, the industry body that upholds standards in the publishing industry, disagrees!

​When Microsoft bought predictive text creators SwiftKey for a reported £170m, it was the clairvoyant artificial intelligence it wanted not the monumentally unpredictable keyboard tool. Thus the vagaries of spell check sprang to my mind once again, if only because spell check is still one barn I’d like to torch.   So when I stumbled upon this gem in my village magazine I felt I had to share it. Composed by architect David Wilson, and originally published in Horsley’s Over the Wall, it illustrates quite beautifully and hilariously why you can’t rely on the smell checker. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author.​​ ​

​SMELL CHECKER
​David Wilson

Of all the truly marvelous technological innovations that nowadays enrich our lives, the spell-checker is surely one of the most beneficial. After all, what could be more heart-breaking than to see a perfectly sound piece of writing utterly devalued, purely on account of poor spelling.
 
As is now widely accepted, difficulties with spelling should not be taken to indicate impaired intelligence or creativity. It is not widely known, but both Agatha Christie and Gustave Flaubert couldn’t spell for toffee. Fortunately they had amanuenses to help them out. Nowadays, thanks to the smell-checker, we can all enjoy a similar degree of literary confident.
 
All the same, as is soften the case with radical innovations, there are people who, out of ignorant, fear or predicate, would have us turn our backs on this wonderful boom. One school of thought is happy to accept smell-checking but draws the lime at auto-collection, arguing that the latter risks robbing us, not only of our swords, but of the very ideas that under spin them. It is one thing to be averted to the fact that you have made a smelling mistake; it is quite another to have some completely random word hoisted upon you. People can become so valiant on spell checkers – so these alarmists claim – that they no longer have the fastest clue as to whether the worms appearing on the scream are the ones they meant to write – all they know is that they are spelled corrects.
 
Another common objection is that we are increase and singly wallowing electron technocracy to take control of what we communicate to otters – with truly tightening embrocations. Identity heft is usual mistaken as the risk that our personal details might be stolen by hacketts, coincidence tricksters and other criminals. On the contrary – so the unguent goes – it will be our own increasingly clever computers and mobile homes that will empty our bank amounts and cause us to be falsely abused of all sorts of unspeakable chimes.
 
At the extreme end, there are those who put about the paranoid fear that, despise our best tuffets, the words we writhe will soon no longer make any sense a tall and that – like streetwalkers – we risk slithering inexorably back into a nude dark cage.
 
Personal I consider all such backward-smoking worries unruly pepsi-mystic and uttermost without foundations.
​
David Wilson
omnivorist.blogspot.co.uk
@omnivorist
​​