I guess this doesnt have to be just whilst editing, but it seems the most appropriate place for this. I was just typing away and as I always do, got to the end of a paragraph and started looking at all the red underlined words and rereading what I had wrote to make sure it made sense or see if it could be written better and I came across something that im sure we are all familiar with - words that are completely out of place to what we were trying to write. In this case I went to write "shock was what Bretton felt" and instead I wrote "shock was welt Bretton felt" Now, you can't accidently mistype what and get welt, the letters are not close enough on the keyboard, so its a case of your mind running ahead of your fingers with my brain aleady thinking the world felt whilst I was trying to type what. I then noticed the writing software had highlighted a "mispelt" word. Well, no it wasn't, it's just using an American dictionary and therefore doesn't know what the letter U is for. Which reminded me of a funny incident from many moons ago. I was writing to a bunch of sports coaches stating that their monthly fees needed to be paid and that they could make payment by either cash or cheque at reception. I ran it through words spell checker and, as I always used to do, just hit accept for every correction suggestion that came up, not giving it a second thought. A week later a coach comes in and asks how can she pay in Cherubs. A very puzzled me asked what was she on about and she showed me my letter and indead it said they could make payment by either cash or cherub at reception. I immediately twigged what must have happened and opened up word to test it out. Sre enough, American dictionary was selected and when I typed in cheque and ran spell checker it found a mistake because Americans spell cheque, check. The suggested correction for cheque, was, Cherub. - And much laughter was had by all. So what funny things have you found that you have unintentionally typed or auto corrected??
Mispelt? The dictionary this forum software uses does not recognize that word (and a lot more!) True, but just failing to be funny. Again. Some of the best writing assistants/editing/spill chicken apps come from UK and use British English, so they can confuse some American writers. Many of my typing errors are physical; not hitting a key hard enough or a key not registering when depressed. Many, buy but not close to all. My all-time favorite remains spill chicken for spell checking.
In my case, none of it makes sense. At the end of every other paragraph something goes wrong, but I've had a recurring cliche of misnaming a key character in my story. I decided to keep it because it seemed funny to me and I figure readers might notice it for a laugh anyways. Basically making the 'mistake' canon. My best discoveries have been from errors.
I once had 'sympathize' changed to 'symptomatic' in a story, and I caught it about a month later while rereading through it.
To err is sometimes divine... Apparently Neil Gaiman's 'Coraline' should have been 'Caroline'. I've changed and updates character names while on the first draft, most of them secondary characters. Suppose you can always read your text slowly, instead of hitting the tempting button. Or use a typewriter, if you can stand the noise.
My muscle memory often changes words that I'm typing. "an" becomes "and" (yes, it even happened in this very line!) "the" becomes "then" and other things like this. I often don't even notice it before rereading. Particularly the "and" thing - that d often appears as if by magic. Sometimes I also mix up similar words from German and English. Typing "and" instead of "und" or the other way around.
The “success”, should one use that term, of iPhone autocorrect and Google’s predictive auto fill for searches make me nervous about self driving cars.
