Spelling Check
From the time I first began writing papers for school with a word-processor program, I remember using that program's spell check feature. This was in the 90s, and later when I became a journalist for the Marine Corps, I used it for my professional work. Microsoft Word's spell checker caught many mistakes and always proved useful. It became something I never forgot to do: finish a story, run the spell checker. And when I began using Adobe InDesign to lay out the newspaper, I used its spell check function again: lay out the paper, run the spell checker. I didn't always agree with the grammatical corrections it offered, but I found that tool useful also. It's always good to get a second opinion.
Spell checkers have been around for a long time. Les Earnest, while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961, created the first spell checker to fit with a program he wrote to recognize bitmap images of handwriting (Earnest 2011). He had a dictionary on seven reels of computer tape, and he brought this dictionary with him when he transferred to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL). In 1971 he gave this dictionary to graduate student Ralph Gorin, "who made a spelling corrector that
looked for single character changes that would match a real word and interactively
assisted the user in making corrections" (Earnest 2011). So when personal computers started to become more widely used, the basic program of the spell checker was already in place.
These days, you MUST use this tool. As the American Psychological Association's Publication Manual says, simply, "Most word-processing programs have a function that checks spelling. Use it" (2009). The programs now are fast, efficient, and can learn to adjust to your particular writing style. I remember, writing journalism, some of the terms we used were correct in the context of the Marine Corps but not according to the spell checker, and in this case you have the option to direct the program to 'learn' the new term, effectively expanding your dictionary in a personal way.
References
American Psychological Association. (2009). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Earnest, L. (2011, May). The first three spelling checkers . Retrieved January 20, 2018, from https://web.archive.org/web/20121022091418/http://www.stanford.edu/~learnest/spelling.pdf
Spell checkers have been around for a long time. Les Earnest, while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961, created the first spell checker to fit with a program he wrote to recognize bitmap images of handwriting (Earnest 2011). He had a dictionary on seven reels of computer tape, and he brought this dictionary with him when he transferred to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL). In 1971 he gave this dictionary to graduate student Ralph Gorin, "who made a spelling corrector that
looked for single character changes that would match a real word and interactively
assisted the user in making corrections" (Earnest 2011). So when personal computers started to become more widely used, the basic program of the spell checker was already in place.
These days, you MUST use this tool. As the American Psychological Association's Publication Manual says, simply, "Most word-processing programs have a function that checks spelling. Use it" (2009). The programs now are fast, efficient, and can learn to adjust to your particular writing style. I remember, writing journalism, some of the terms we used were correct in the context of the Marine Corps but not according to the spell checker, and in this case you have the option to direct the program to 'learn' the new term, effectively expanding your dictionary in a personal way.
References
American Psychological Association. (2009). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Earnest, L. (2011, May). The first three spelling checkers . Retrieved January 20, 2018, from https://web.archive.org/web/20121022091418/http://www.stanford.edu/~learnest/spelling.pdf
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