The limitations of Spellcheck and other writing aids is a common theme here. I maintain they are of great assistance to good writers and can be a trap for others.

Fir instants, accordion to spell check, they is nothing Wong with this pare graph. Know red lines under any off the words eye have used. A parentally, hive written these sent tenses purr freckly.

You might say this is a silly example so let’s take a real life example I saw in a recent newspaper article.

I should note when I initially saw this article, the lead paragraph referred to a ‘disposal device’ that clearly was meant to be ‘disposable device’ but Spellcheck didn’t identify the mistake. Someone corrected the error post-publication and republished.

That someone made a post-publication correction to the article only further highlights the howler in the fifth paragraph: “… components produced on mass”. What? Do you mean ‘en masse’?

That’s just wrong; even if Spellcheck doesn’t think so.

I concede this is a small error in a brief online article and I have no desire to make it seem more than it is. It was merely a handy example. The reason for the discussion is that I think when people read this sort of mistake, their perception of the writer, the newspaper and possibly the media generally, is lowered.

If you saw something similar in business literature, from emails and websites to brochures and Annual Reports, the result would be the same.

However, anytime I point out examples like this, people just shrug and say ‘nobody cares’.

To me it’s a ‘one broken window’ issue. It is one of the reasons I started Your-Editor.

So is it true – does nobody care?

(By the way, if you didn’t identify more than a dozen errors in the second paragraph, contact me…)