Learning from mistakes, literally

Over the last couple of weeks, I learned an important lesson about the value of automatic spellchecking.

Ever since modern text processor programs introduced spellcheckers (I'm too young for the growing-up-with-ispell generation), I hated them, for basically two reasons. First, I had always been pretty good at spelling bees as a kid, so I was arrogant enough to think that I didn't need a computer telling me how to spell my words. Second, spellcheckers would always stumble upon "simple" words that aren't in dictionaries, like my last name for starters. When you write technical documentation, it's even worse. Every second word is a technical term there and you have to teach the checker all of them, including variations like plural forms or genetives.

The shamefully high number of typos in the book as it has been printed and sold several hundred times made me overcome that arrogance and laziness and I learned an important lesson: Spellcheckers are extremely useful tools, especially when you write professional or academic texts (and I'm thankful for learning that lesson now before writing my Master's thesis or even doctoral dissertation). Of course, because of the typical size of such documents, it usually pays off only for those kinds of documents to spend that time and teach your spellcheckers all your special words. I still am annoyed by the spellchecker in the Skype instant messenger window and I would probably never use one for spellchecking emails, either.

Of course, spellcheckers cannot replace your reviewers. Now I learned that the reverse is also true: reviewers cannot replace your spellchecker, either. They are humans just as you and a typo here and there easily slips through their fingers, unless they really are professionals, I guess. Or would you have found that an "e" is missing in "heterogenous"? I bet not...