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August 22, 2000

You worked for four months on it. Thousands of hours of research. Endless typing and organizing and formatting. Fifteen bucks to print it on heavyweight paper in colour ink, and another two-fifty to spiral-bind it in a plastic cover. And there it is, all 65 pages of it. . . a veritable work of art. Absolutely perfect in every way.

Except, wait, there! On the very first page. "Veterinarians are people who do not eat meat". Veterinarians??? And then you realize: the evil spell checker strikes again.

Once upon a time, way way back in the stone ages when our parents were in school, they had to prepare their documents on cave walls- er- typewriters. And they had to proofread them all by themselves. Every mistake meant retyping the entire page or even document from scratch. Typographical errors were so common, people started calling them "typos" because "typographical error" had so many syllables in it.

Then . . . the dawning of a new era. The age of the spellchecker. The computarized word processor was such a magnificent invention, since it enabled the average poor speller to produce near-perfect documents with the click of the button. Gone were the days of writing “hte” instead of “the”.

Oh, sure, everyone conceded, they’re not perfect. They can’t distinguish between “their” and “there” and even “they’re”. They can’t point out grammatical errors, or repeated or eliminated words. They’ll never replace proofreading; they’re simply a useful tool to help those of us who are challenged in this particular area.

But as new software came out with more and more sophisticated capabilities, people tended to become a little lax about doing their own verification. Today’s spell checkers can underline misspelled words as you type, highlight grammatical errors, suggest sentence structures, even correct common mistakes on the fly. It seems like there is nothing they can’t do. Therefore, logically there is nothing that we need to do anymore. Right?

The problem with spell checkers is that we have become lazy. As intelligent as this software has become, it cannot replace the human brain and never will be able to. Microsoft Word may know if you accidentally repeated an “and”, but it can’t know whether you’re referring to vegetarians or veterinarians.

Those auto-correct features are so sneaky, you may end up with something changed in your document that you don’t even know about. For example, you want to type the sentence: “May I have a glass of water please?”, but the software sees “May” and assumes you want to write today’s date, May 24, 2000. So your final document, unbeknownst to you, now reads “May 24, 2000 I please have a glass of water?”. No underlines, no highlights, no warnings.

I have a confession to make. I’m typing this in Microsoft Word right now. And just like most of you, I usually wait to right-click on those red-underlined words rather than closely examining my spelling. Most of the time, my documents end up fine, which makes me lucky. Or perhaps unlucky. Because I have no incentive to learn to correct my own spelling and grammar. So next time I bring my dog to the vegetarian, I may end up regretting the fact that I am a victim . . . of the evil spell checker.

P.S. Anyone who notices any spelling errors on this or any other page, please e-mail me.