TALKING THE TALK

“Can I trust spell checkers to correct a word I’ve spelled wrong?” In a word, no. The spell checker may suggest bizarre substitutes for many proper names and specialized terms (even when you spell them correctly) and for certain typographical errors, thus introducing wrong words into your paper if you accept its suggestions automatically. For example, a student who had typed fantic instead of frantic found that the spell checker’s first choice was to substitute fanatic—a replacement that made no sense. Wrong-word errors are the most common surface error in college writing today (see Chapter 1), and spell checkers are partly to blame. So be careful not to take a spell checker’s recommendation without paying careful attention to the replacement word.