News for July 2010
Dumb Mistakes or Self-Sabotage?
Anyone who’s created written material for business or academics knows how easy it is to get fumble-fingers and slip in a typo or two. “Teh” instead of “the” is so common it’s become an Internet meme. Homonyms are also fertile ground for mistakes: “your” instead of “you’re,” affect vs. effect, there/their/they’re.
Sometimes people just don’t know how to spell a word and are too lazy to look it up. Or they select the wrong word for the job, with a meaning that’s slightly off-base, inserted as a “show-off” word–if you use big words you’ll look smart, right?
Modern word processing applications with spell-checker have helped somewhat, but they still can’t get rid of those pesky homonyms.
Check out this poem, titled “Ode To a Spell Checker:” (more…)
Edited: July 14th, 2010