With the near ubiquity of spell-checkers across all platforms, many people no longer worry about correct spelling. Let the spell-checkers handle it! And they do—mostly. But spell-checkers don’t care about context; if we spell the word correctly, they’re happy. So, “I here you” has spell-checkers turning cartwheels.
At some things, a human brain still performs better than a computer, like distinguishing homonyms—here and hear; there, their, and they’re—or words spelled correctly but confused with similar-looking words—adverse and averse. Spell-checkers get it right most of the time, and writers need to help them the rest of the way by carefully proofreading. WordRake founder Gary Kinder makes a similar argument in his writing tip Fishing and Renal Services.
I have always cared about writing and spelling. In third grade, I lost a spelling bee when I misspelled disciple—especially awkward at a Catholic school. I vowed I would win the spelling bee when I got to middle school. For weeks in sixth grade, I pored over 1,000 entries on a list of possible words, and I won. But after winning, I advanced to the citywide spelling bee, where I got so nervous I spelled janitor with a g. At age eleven, I wasn’t sure I would recover.
As adults we have a lot more riding on our spelling than winning a spelling bee, yet misspellings and incorrect usage still creep into our email to a prospective employer, a new client, or an intimidating colleague and make us look unprofessional and unreliable. And we can’t expect the spell-checkers to do all the checking for us.
WordRake editing software is not a spell-checker, but from it we learn the same lesson: Don’t rely on proofreading software blindly. WordRake will help us spot needless words so we can write more clearly and concisely, but about 6% of the time, it will suggest an edit that slightly changes the meaning. That’s where writer and WordRake collaborate: WordRake draws our eye to the sentence, then we take over: “I see what you’re trying to do; I wouldn’t have noticed that; I’ll take it from here.”
Think of spell-checkers as collaborators like WordRake: working with the writer, but not perfect. It’s the nature of the English language—200,000 English words and all their permutations. When we make a typo, the spell-checkers take over and correct it for us. And when we get too close to our writing, we’re too tired, or we don’t know how to tighten our sentences, WordRake takes over, because it knows far more edits than any human editor could ever keep in her head.
