I just read a thriller novel by one of the biggest names in the business and noted five misspelled words, all errors that I doubt human editors would make ('shuttered' for 'shuddered', for example. Running into spelling or grammatical mistakes pulls me out of the story for a second. Very annoying.
I think the question would be more appropriate if said like this: Does anyone like spellcheckers? One thing that particularly annoys me is when I misspell a word, I right-click to see what it was supposed to be (if I don't remember how to spell the word) and only one suggestion comes up. Surely if there's only one suggestion, it can change it automatically? You are not alone, my friend.
YES! This right here! Also, spellcheck is a serious prude. Never mind actual "four letter words", I don't expect (or need) help with those, but try getting it to help you with something like titillate or masturbate. You can be off by just one letter but nooOOOooo, it won't help you. I feel like it's telling me, "You are a potty mouth and I hate working for you."
I find spellcheckers that only offer US suggestions to be annoying. Spell checkers can't always correct for inappropriate words. These is why awl ewe gulls and bouys have two pay attention.
Sounds like you need a robotic arm, not a spell checker... I always accept that computers are still not Artificial Intelligence. The machine is stupid. It only does what we tell it to, so it isn't the spell checker at fault. It's that lousy programmer who aces in logic, where failing miserably in data retention or provision. Most checkers, though, have the ability to "add word" meaning the user must actually go to the BAD (Big Ass Dictionary) to find the accepted existence and spelling. Computers are tools. Computers are assistants. We still are ultimately the responsible boobs behind our mess.
I like spellcheckers for the occasional red flag - but I never rely on them to catch everything. That's my job.
I agree fully with two previous posters: Google, and Microsoft Word are set to American spellings, and I have to set it myself to 'English (UK)' every time I get a new computer. So it'll flag 'Defence' up as wrong, and suggest 'Defense' instead. It's not major, I can ignore it, but sometimes this shit will change automatically, and that makes me want to spit blood. But, I am only human, I do make the odd slip sometimes, and I like having something lie a Spellchecker as a help, but I always try to not rely on it. Whenever I go down that road, even a little bit, I get the strange feeling my degree scroll secretly hates me for it. Mind, I hate Spellcheckers on phones. The vocabulary on those things are always extremely limited I find - maybes it's the phones I buy.
Yes and No - it's a love/hate relationship. Just when you think the spellchecker has made your life so much easier you realize it's highlighting words it doesn't know and wasting valuable time confusing you as you check and double check. Since I'm notorious for making up words by jamming two real words together this drives me batty. Or it thinks your last sentence is just jim-dandy when there's a total odd ( but perfectly spelled ) word in the mix. I must say though, since using spellchecker - my spelling has greatly improved -
I just hate it when I create my own words or use names that are odd. For example, every time I use my MC's name (Alesia) the red zig-zags appear.
I do quite a bit of translating into Spanish, and MS Word's Spanish spell checker is surprisingly good. It helps me out a lot with accent marks in the right places and correcting masculine/feminine discrepancies. So I like it for that. For English, I don't mind spellcheck, but it does get on my nerves sometimes. One thing I can't stand though is grammar check in MS Word... I HATE grammar check, especially when it glitches out and flags a whole paragraph as being ill constructed. It's like it doesn't recognize anything other than academic writing as proper. I usually just end up disabling it so I don't have to look at the stupid little green underlining that I am invariably going to ignore.
ms word can be set by the user to check documents in any language on their looooong list, as well as english... and you can switch from one to another with a couple of clicks...
I like spellcheckers. It sounds like the OP might be complaining about auto-correctors. Those I could happily do without. I'm fine when teh is automatically corrected, but I hate it when Google or EBay changes a search word for me that I didn't want changed.
I don't use 'em. For all the above reasons. I tried running a finished chapter through my spellchecker to catch typos, several years ago. Instead it caught my dialogue which contained particularly Scottish or ethnic words, names of people, places and things, etc. I got fed up asking it to 'learn' these terms, and just quit. I have enough confidence in my ability to spell AND USE A DICTIONARY to not need this addition to my writing arsenal. What I do find invaluable though, is the 'find and destroy' function. If I'm over-using a particular word or phrase I can get my machine to 'find' instances where it appears in the MS, and then I can replace some of these instances with other words, or say things in a different way. It's also invaluable when I decide to change something, like somebody's name, when I'm halfway through a long novel. But spellcheckers? Nah. More trouble than they're worth, in my humble opinion.
I think you can set your spell check to ignore certain words so that won't continue to happen. Edit: Alesia just right click the word or name in your text, then in the drop down menu box click on ignore all and it won't give it the red squiggly underline anymore.
Changing dictionary is easy in MS Word and Libre Writer (which I use), but in things like Firefox it is a little more than a couple of clicks once you have figured out how to get the option to install other Dictionaries in the first place. Would be nice if everything happened automatically without any effort or input from me. I shall stop grumbling now - my first coffee is ready and I can feel my mood improving already.
I am thankful for them. The amount of words I was obliviously spelling incorrectly beggars belief. Putting up with highlighting regional variations, place names and slang is a small price to pay for what I'm gaining back.
Ha you shouldn't leave such open ended statements like that with all the perverts around here, especially me.
My sister-in-law is a surgeon and fired of a text to a fellow surgeon who would be on call that night and she requested that he keep an eye on suchandsuch from the resected bowel procedure she performed earlier that day. The spell checker studiously fixed up bowels to read balls.
This.^ But even more infuriating to me are those changes that MS Word makes automatically. I mean, I've been doing all my own writing since I was 6.
Well, I'm currently using Google Chrome as I write this, and the annoying American spell checker does really wind me up sometimes. Thankfully it doesn't auto-correct it.
Yeah. I'm not a PC/Microsoft user, so I don't know how this is done on that planet, but on Planet Apple, you do this through the Preferences. No need to gnash teeth over it. Just pull the plug!
