Okay, I’m interrupting the promised comma lecture to rant about a topic dear to my heart: that fascist buzzkill we call Spell Check. I’m actually writing this on Friday, after a stressful week of wrapping up pieces for our fall publication and a few particularly stressful press releases, including one lengthy release that is so long and involved that my boss and I have both been hacking at it for days.
So, just now I added the last little piece of outstanding information on a [note: totally fictional] Madame Saint-Remy, who has announced her intent to donate to the college her collection of Faberge-inspired cat figurines. I noticed that, in two consecutive sentences, Spell Check had highlighted two seemingly random parenthetical expressions that were suitably corralled within commas. (Highlighted in green, I might add, which is Spell Check’s passive-aggressive way of making you second-guess your own grasp of the English language. More on this in a moment…)
Apparently, the sentence “Madame Saint-Remy has been a member of the Friends of the Art Gallery since 1972, chairing the publicity committee for the last 12 years” was too convoluted for Spell Check. It highlighted “1972,” and, in the next sentence, “Previously,” – as in “Previously, she was president of the Glenhaven Garden Club.” WTF? I could see how the first sentence could be phrased differently, but what the hell is wrong with the second???
We’ll most likely never know, since Spell Check – ironically – isn’t so great at communicating. It throws out these smug little suggestions like “Fragment. Consider revising.” with no consideration of a) people who don’t know what a sentence fragment is, and b) sentences that have verbs and are therefore NOT fragments, but Spell Check misses the verb because Spell Check is evil and stupid. And furthermore, Spell Check, it’s my God-given right to use sentence fragments as artistic style when I damned well feel like it. I even put two of them in the second paragraph, just to piss you off.
Then there are those annoying red and green underline thingies: red for misspelled words, or my last name, and green for grammatical errors. And when you open the little window that happily tells you what you’ve done wrong, your choices are something like this:
- Change
- Change all of the other places where you made this same mistake, you imbecile
- Ignore once
- Ignore all of your other glaring errors, too
- Ignore, really? Are you suuuuuuuure? Oh, well, it’s your funeral. Imbecile.
The problem with Spell Check, obviously, is that it’s a computer program. It doesn’t always consider the context of an entire sentence – I’m not sure it can even identify where sentences begin and end. Instead, Spell Check assumes you wanted to use this commonly misspelled word and not that one, or that it’s a mistake for the these two words to end up side by side, even when the writer knows precisely what she’s doing. I can’t tell you how many times Spell Check offers to “fix” subject/verb agreement for me… and most of the time, it’s wrong.
And then there are the really obvious things that it doesn’t catch, like using the wrong version of your/you’re or there/their/they’re. Or when it tells you you’ve misspelled a word, but throws up its hands when you ask for a suggestion on how the word is really spelled.
Ugh. So, bottom line – Spell Check is a useful tool with its share of flaws. And, like any tool, under no circumstances should you permit it to boss you around. You don’t hang the pictures where your hammer tells you; why should you let a computer program tell you how to write?
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