Phil: A news story that Brits rely on spellcheckers to stop them from making embarrassing mistakes!caught my eye this week.
In part, this was because of the line “Phil Parker vowed never to sign off his emails with “regards” after mistakenly writing “retards Phil” in an email to his boss.”. It’s not me, but I have been frustrated by autocorrection when posting from my phone or tablet in the past.
I’ll admit that I do like a spellchecker though. Yes, I should be able to spell perfectly and know my grammar inside out, but even if you are perfect (and if you are, you’re probably so smug people want to slap you) then you still make typos. I know I do when my brain is working faster than my fingers can rattle away on the keyboard.
Some words seem especially prone to problems – snadpaper and sodlering (sandpaper and soldering) are particular bete noires of mine, along with obvioulsy. The wiggly red line appears time and time again, not because I’m stupid (mostly) but simply slow fingers.
Of course, not everything has a spellchecker. There are a couple of forums I frequent for work that don’t. This leaves me with a choice to either risk typo time, read everything to death, or write in a tool that does check spelling and then paste it into the forum. It kind of ruins the spontaneity (interesting that WordPress checker was happy with spontanayity), although sometimes that’s no bad thing!
Spurred on by adverts on YouTube, I’m now trying Grammarly which sits on my computer and checks stuff. The basic version is free for the moment, which probably means it’s reading everything I write and spiriting it away for a master criminal to read in his volcano lair. Sadly for him, I counter this by writing a lot about nerdy subjects, any master plan revolving around rather more juicy information!
So far, this is all pretty good. It doesn’t always switch itself on when I want it but that’s not too bad. The thing I hadn’t expected was a weekly results e-mail. Apparently, I’m more productive than 95% of users with 12504 words written in the last week. Sadly, I’m only more accurate than 37% of users, and that score has gone up a little bit. I blame my prodigious output.
Did I say “prodigious”? Yes I did. That’s because, with 2734 different words used, I use more words than 98% of users.
Smug face on!
nolanparker 