I say “le screw” to the spellchecker. I spell pretty damned well in the first place, and in the second place much of my writing is done in such a way as to convey a flavor of my spoken speech, and therefore can be idiosyncratically spelled intentionally. Spellcheckers don’t understand this, and give me fits of annoyance which tend to result in cracked LCDs…
If it’s a Microsoft spellchecker, then fuck it in the neck with a barbed wire wrapped dildo which has been dragged backwards through and over-beshat cat box. I’m just sayin’…
Only when we can capably raise most people, who are born with language abilities programmed into their brains, to be able to use the language competently will we be even in the remotest vicinity of being able to teach AI how to approach English grammar with the accuracy required to substitute for even a decent copy editor.
Of course, teaching it one person’s specific stylistic nuances is a less daunting task, because that’s a matter of simply telling it to ignore certain words, phrases and constructions.
Turn off the auto-format or auto-correct option in the TOOLS menu, or rather turn off the specific option you don’t want to use. I don’t have it fill in hyphens and such, but I do have it set up to, for instance, correct common (for me) typos. For instance, in my novel I have a character who was originally named “JayJay” but is now called “Rosemary.” With autoformat I can have the computer automatically correct me if I accidentally use the old name, or forget to capitalize the first R in Rosemary, or accidentally put a space between the e and the m, and so forth.
The key to using Word is to figure out which features you want, and turnoff the rest.
Yup. It’s a major grrr for me when I tell people I’m a copyeditor and they say, “Can’t they just use spell-check?” Gosh, you’re right, the hours and hours I spend on a manuscript can be replaced by a button in Word! Why didn’t anyone think of that! I’ll notify my clients about this handy shortcut and close up shop immediately! :rolleyes:
I do use spell-check as PART of my electronic editing toolkit. But I don’t use it in real time, and I run it only to check for typos AFTER I’ve finished the substantive pass through the text. Some editors I know use exclusion dictionaries to flag troublemaker words (for instance, to always stop on “pubic”), but I haven’t gotten that fancy yet.
All “grammar check” programs are worse than useless.
I despise grammar check, but spelling is something that just doesn’t come naturally to me. I would rather just get my ideas on paper than worry about spelling details. I love spell check. I also love theGoogle tool bar. Not only does it have a good spellchecker, it also has a google search bar, and an auto-fill option that will fill in your address, etc., on online forms. I use it all the time.
Well, I don’t see it as having to do with whether you’re a nazi about your own spelling/grammar or not – it’s about when you go all Hitler on your text. I definitely correct my spelling and grammar as I write, too, but I’m not going to stop my flow just to correct Word when it thinks that an en-dash is a hyphen.
But, like I said, different writing processes for different folks. Another example coming up…
Yes, I agree that I use it as one part of my editing process – I tend to run it first, though.
I definitely correct my spelling and grammar as I write, too, but I’m not going to stop my flow just to correct Word when it thinks that an en-dash is a hyphen.