

Ask HN: Do you use a spell checker? - plg

context: my students were shocked to find out that I don&#x27;t use a spell checker (I never have)... well apart from the one between my ears of course
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nmc
A spell checker can be useful to correct typos, especially if you are like me
— I look at the keyboard about 50% of the time when I type.

In my mother tongue, I have a perfect orthographical sense: I just need a
glimpse of a word to know if the spelling is correct. As a result, proof-
reading requires close to zero effort, and I do not use a spell checker for my
mother tongue.

I type a lot in English, and I have come to realize that I do not have this
same orthographical sense. Particularly, there are a lot of transparent words
between English and my mother tongue with just subtle differences in the
spelling, which makes me likely to spell them wrong — e.g. replace "n" by "nn"
or "e" by "ea". So I usually have a spell checker on when I type in English.

Also, did you ask your students why they were shocked?

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fr0sty
Do you take pains to disable the various spell-checkers that exist or do you
just use software which does not have them on by default?

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plg
mainly I use plain text editors like sublime text, emacs, etc

if I happen to use something with a spell checker I usually don't even notice
it, and if I do I turn it off

now it's not that I never make typos, or I never make spelling mistakes. These
happen all the time. The point is that I correct them when I read, and re-
read, edit, and re-edit whatever I am working on (even a "simple" email)...
using the spellchecker between my ears

It has the desirable side effect that I also am 'forced' to re-read what I've
written, and inevitably, I change something, I hope to make it better

I think a lot of people have a workflow that goes something like this:

\- hammer out some text \- correct errors in real time based on spell checker
flags \- at the end, scan the document for spell checker colors; if none, then
I am done!

I am a huge proponent of reading and re-reading whatever I am writing at least
5 times, and editing/changing as I go. I spot typos and spelling mistakes via
this process.

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MichaelStubbs
For the vast majority of the time, I don't. If I ever get truly stuck, Google
often gives me a push in the right direction.

------
plg
context: my students were shocked to find out that I don't use a spell checker
(I never have)... well apart from the one between my ears of course

~~~
nmc
You should edit your post to add that as the "text" of the post.

~~~
plg
thanks for the pointer, done

