Nightmare on Typo Street: Misusing Spelling and Grammar Checkers

Imagine for a moment…

You’ve been working nights and weekends on a brochure for a new local restaurant, Big Jake’s College Grille. Your design rocks. The graphics look sweet. All you have left is to make a few content changes, double-check the design and send it to the printer.

You say to yourself, “Maybe I should look it over once more. Better run the spelling checker.” So, you run your trusty spelling and grammar checker, confident that it will flag any errors. You make the recommended changes. You call Big Jake to tell him the brochure is ready… just in time for the Grand Opening this weekend.

On Saturday, you decide to stop by and grab a burger at Big Jake’s. You are anxious to see how busy they are on opening day. When you arrive, the parking lot is full, but not of hungry college students. There are at least a dozen police cars surrounding the Grille. What is going on?

You walk inside the store and are met by several police officers and an angry, red-faced Big Jake. “THAT’S THE GUY!,” he shouts. “He is the one that put it on the brochure.”

“What are you talking about? What happened?” you ask.

I told you the headline on the brochure should be “College Grille – Hot, fast, and cheap” not “College Girls – Hot, fast, and cheap!”

As you feel all eyes turn to you, your voice starts to shake. “I KNOW I ran the spellchecker… I know I did…”

And then, you wake up in a pool of sweat.

Typos cause all types of nightmares. So, what are typos anyway? Webster’s Dictionary calls them “errors in typed or typeset material.” When we think of typos, we usually think of misspelled words. However, they can also be punctuation errors, missing words, and wrong words. They lurk in your content, your ALT tags, your Meta descriptions, and, oh, about a thousand other places on your site.

There are quite a few spelling and grammar checkers out there on the market. Most of them come bundled in a piece of software. For illustration’s sake, let’s take a look at the MS Word grammar checker. Here are a few sentences it thinks are correct:

  • The boy the girl love is here.
  • They returned to quickly.
  • The ship has completed all it’s voyages.
  • He will leave before I arrived.
  • Every boy and girl took him seat.
  • Me am happy.
  • I like to go to store.
  • Susan had several the cats.

Those aren’t even the worst that I’ve found. Now, that’s not to say that spelling and grammar checking software is all bad. In fact, it is a fast way to find some of the glaring errors in a document; but it’s not foolproof. You really shouldn’t rely on it alone.

But, editing your own words can also be problematic. The more you work on a document, the less you are able to edit it. After a while, your brain sees only what it wants to see, not necessarily what is really there.

“Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in what oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mind deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”

The bottom line is that you can’t really edit your own stuff, and you can’t trust your computer to do it either. The best solution is to have a professional editor review all of your content before it’s published.

© Copyright 2006, Doug Davis