Spielcheck

If you were to walk abroad with mud on your face or a great rip in your pants, you might not get a very good response from John Q. Public.  So it is with your website or email messages; if there are glaring spelling, grammatical or punctuation errors in your prose, you may lose face - and maybe some readers as well.

Some of the words most often misspelled are commission, referral, separate, receive, allege, always, affiliate, attach.  What to do about it?  Use a spellchecker.  Most wordprocessing programs - and some email providers - include a spellchecker.

Sometimes the wrong word may appear in text because of a misspelling; for example,  "loose" (pronounced 'looce') is used instead of "lose" (pronounced 'looze').  A similar problem arises with homonyms - words sounding the same but having different spellings and/or meanings, such as "there" (meaning 'in that place') and "their" (meaning 'belonging to them').  Perhaps the commonest of these errors involves "its" and "it's".  "Its" means 'belonging to it' - in a sentence such as: "I liked its flavour."  "It's", on the other hand, is short for "It is" - in a sentence such as: "It's strawberry flavoured."

One of the prolbems with misspellings is that whlie our eyes may catch the error, our brains are so smart that they often understand words even if letters are transposed.  Did you notice the two misspellings in this last sentence?  Chances are that you did not.  'Problems' and 'while' were both misspelled, but your brain probably made the necessary adjustments and you may not have noticed the errors.

A good spellchecker program will solve that problem.  It will not, however, notice if you type 'from', when you meant 'form'.  To catch errors like that needs proofreading and you will almost certainly discover that you cannot proofread your own writing.  Your 'smart' brain will often let you down by covering up your mistakes!

Ask somebody else to check your work - starting with the heading.  Headline errors are notorious.  Just because something is written in huge capital letters, it is not necessarily correct.

Now I must go and get somebody to proofread this article to make sure the only misspellings are ones I put in to make a point!

Robin Beaumont

Robin Beaumont, born, bred and educated in England, now lives in New Brunswick, Canada.  He started his writing career before there were electric typewriters, tape recorders, electronic calculators, computers or an Internet.  This short article is the first of a series on the proper use of the written word.