Wednesday, 6 February 2013

Spellchecker failure

Newspapers long ago dispensed with proofreaders, having decided that spellchecker would do the job for them.  Unfortunately spellchecker does not pick up words that are actually spelt correctly, but the wrong word in the context.

Two found in the same article in the Sunday Times this week:

With the excellence of his performance against Scotland we now that it was not ideas, but gas.

Farrell Jr is already an infinite superior Union player to his father.

In the second case infinite should be infinitely.

Mistakes like this fall into the category of letters left out to form a completely new word:

her becomes he, then becomes the, bonny becomes bony, scar becomes car.

These are very difficult mistakes to pick up.  The thing is, when a reader comes across this kind of thing in your promotional material he or she is likely to pause, to try and make out what the word should be, or perhaps completely misunderstand what you are trying to say.  Worst of all, they may just abandon reading at that point.

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