One of the worst ever problems with spellcheck on computers is that it often doesn’t catch the errors it needs to, or catches errors that aren’t even errors. This is what often kills your writing. Your spelling is correct, in the eyes of Spellcheck. Or you made up a word, and Spellcheck doesn’t know the word yet. But the most fatal and hardest to catch of any errors is the word spelled right – except that wasn’t the word you wanted.
This is an easy mistake to make. There’s a lot of words in the world and it’s so easy to write the wrong one. The homonym is often the culprit (even I almost wrote “right” instead of “write” just now), but even more maddening, and often harder to catch, is the typo. You accidentally put two letters the wrong way around. Okay, fine, Spellcheck should notice that. Except it creates a different word, and Spellcheck doesn’t know that’s not the word you wanted. How is it to know you wanted to talk about what you mean, not someone’s mane?
The biggest example, by far, appears to be when people write “form”, meaning “from”. Yes, they’re both real words, but you want a preposition describing a place where an object or person started out, not a noun asking you to fill in your name and address. This is a mistake I’ve made and caught too late, and I’ve seen it cropping up in PhDs, high school essays and even published magazine columns and books. Everyone does it and no one points it out.
Well, it’s time to start pointing it out. The typo that Spellcheck never notices can kill your work dead. Don’t let that happen!