Spell Checkers

Spellchecking is available in all word processing systems. Spellchecking is quick and handy for short papers with few unique words and proper nouns, but it is untrustworthy. Spellcheckers, as stated at the beginning of this Proofreading chapter, do not identify a misspelled word if the misspelling is itself a word, do not distinguish between homophones, do not account for spellings determined by usage, and may allow variant spellings and hyphenations that are incompatible with the house dictionary.

To save yourself some humiliation, build an exclusion dictionary: a list of terms that you want your spellchecker to flag, even if they are simple words. For example, if you add pubic, thee, and widows to your exclusion lexicon, your spellchecker will halt three times in the following sentence: The public library requested the three Windows XP licenses.

Spellchecking significant manuscripts with numerous unique terms may be time-consuming. You can save time by selecting “ignore all” and instructing the computer to disregard all instances of the term in the current document. Alternatively, you may click “add,” which adds the term to the primary or supplementary dictionary you’ve constructed. Spelling modules for several technical domains and many foreign languages are available as add-ons.

Because bibliographies and reference lists contain proper names, spellchecking these parts takes time, and some copyeditors skip this step entirely.

On-screen edits. Running the spellchecker is one of your everyday activities while copyediting on disk. Most copyeditors run the spellchecker before and after altering the file, so they don’t have to correct each typo as it occurs. After the author’s modifications are included in the file, the spellchecker is performed one last time during cleaning.

Hard-copy edits. If you have access to the author’s disk and the author’s files are compatible with your program, using the spellchecker before or after copyediting may help you catch a few hard-to-spot errors.