Lesions from an Kollege Inglish perffesser

[Alex Franke]

This is pretty funny...

http://www.baltimoreexaminer.com/opi...e_English.html

[crokett]

As part of my job I read a lot of technical documents written by technical people. These folks for the most part are well educated - at least a 4 year degree and most have more than that. Their writing is abysmal.

[germdoc]

I can think of a beauty pageant contestant or 2, a lot of sports figures and a couple of politicians who would make his list.

[BobSch]

Abysmal, indeed. If I had seen those quotes without the rest of the article I'd have thought they were written by grade-school students. Some of the misused words are typos, others show a lack of a useable vocabulary, and many just an over-reliance on the noble spell checker.

Eye halve a spelling chequer,
It came with my pea sea.
It plainly marques four my revue,
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word,
And weight four it two say,
Wheather eye am wrong oar wright,
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid,
It nose bee four two long,
And eye can put the error rite,
Its rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it,
I yam shore your pleased two no.
Its letter prefect awl the weigh,
My chequer tolled me sew.

[khf314]

True Story.........

I have to relate a story about over-reliance on the spell checker.

Place where I used to work created a feature to do direct debit of loan payments. They decided to call it "Autopay". They then sent out a letter to all their customers and ran it thru the spell-checker first. The letter came out something like this:

Don't worry about forgetting to write that check - just sign up for Autopsy! If you have Autopsy with your loan, your payment will be made automatically! Best of all Autopsy is Free!

[Tom Slick]

Another funny story about reliance on a spell checker.

A friend of mine works for a city. It is very common for people to misspell "public" as "pubic" and the spell checker doesn't catch it. These are presentations and documents shown in city council meetings and documented as public records.

[LCHIEN]

my favorite typo wouldn't have been caught by a spell checker. this was my second summer job at TI, before PCs so we actually had a sec'y to type drafts of tech documents. We were working on mini computer-based equipment, some one wrote something about "parity-checking" and it came back and was passed in the final document around as "panty-checking".

[crokett]

my favorite typo wouldn't have been caught by a spell checker. this was my second summer job at TI, before PCs so we actually had a sec'y to type drafts of tech documents. We were working on mini computer-based equipment, some one wrote something about "parity-checking" and it came back and was passed in the final document around as "panty-checking".

Believe it or not I saw that once in a document I was writing. I was part of a team and another guy ran some stuff through the spell checker before it went to the proofreader/formatter. She came back and asked if that was really what he meant.

[kirkroy]

I actually have a fair bit of trouble proofreading my own writing if I don't leave a lot of time between the writing and the proofreading. Leaving the extra time is usually not practical though. If I try to proofread right away my brain seems to autocorrect errors like missing words, you're/your its/it's errors, misspellings, etc. It's almost as if I'm not really reading but playing it out of my head while barely looking at what I wrote. It can help to read my writing out loud but, even then, I tend to autocorrect.

I see all kinds of crazy errors in my e-mails and forum postings when I go back and look at them later. I make all the same errors that I see other people making (and it bugs me when I see other people making these errors). I guess I just suck. I'll bet I have errors in this post!

[BobSch]

I actually have a fair bit of trouble proofreading my own writing if I don't leave a lot of time between the writing and the proofreading. Leaving the extra time is usually not practical though. If I try to proofread right away my brain seems to autocorrect errors like missing words, you're/your its/it's errors, misspellings, etc. It's almost as if I'm not really reading but playing it out of my head while barely looking at what I wrote. It can help to read my writing out loud but, even then, I tend to autocorrect.

Which is the best reason to have someone else proof your docs. I worked for many years for a technical training center and no one on Earth spells worse that course developers, especially when it comes to course descriptions.

[Alex Franke]

BobSch -- that's a great poem!

My most common typo is mixing up "now" and "not" -- it's really a muscle memory error, but obviously it's not caught by spelling checkers either. So I'll often mistakenly type things like "Great news -- XYZ feature is not available!"

We also nearly let a national ad get out once promoting some unique cruises that Princess Cruises was offering. The printer actually caught it -- he called me up and asked, "Do you really mean to refer people to Princess' Erotic Adventures brochure?" ...we meant to say exotic. We send him a gift as a thank you.

[germdoc]

Well, I don't want to get too crude, but when a lot of doctors want to say that a patient has a lot of pus coming from a wound, they dictate it as "pus-sy" drainage. You can guess how that looks on the final transcription.

My colleague used to have a whole file of such lovely transcription errors.