To clarify: I tend to spell-check large documents, or anything I do for work. Things like LJ entries and emails I tend to worry less about. I know my spelling and typing are largely accurate and I spot most of my own mistakes.

I don't think spell-checkers 'perpetuate language fascism'; I think they help ensure clear communication and therefore contribute to peace and harmony among speakers of the same language.

Some of the options in the "Furthermore" section may not have been entirely serious :-)

most spell checker highlights are for words or acronyms which I know and the spellchecker doesn't. I believe my email client at work has a spell checker on by default (possibly even the one at home does), and I simply ignore it - the visual equivalent of tuning it out ...

For what it's worth, for a long time, I didn't. Only relatively recently, when firefox came with it on by default, did I decide it was worth it (and download a British dictionary). There's a post somewhere about how I liked it because it was unobtrusive, it has subtle red lines, rather than great honking "FIX THIS NOW BEFORE THINKING ABOUT THE REST OF YOUR SENTENCE" that previously annoyed me.

I used to ran a spell-check over a text (story or letter...) I was writing afterwards but many of you will know how insufficient that is for my writing.

Most of my mistakes are typos, there are a lot. I find the cheker very useful for stopping them. But I'm also a bit vague on spellings that can go either way -- I'll remember the "gh"s, but not whether something was an "i" or a "e" or an "s" or a "z".

If I don't know how to spell a word, I will look it up in an online dictionary. That ensures that I have picked the correct word and not just a word that sounds a bit like it (not that I do that often, but other people do). Mistyping things is another matter entirely, and my usual way of making a mistake.

my recent examples of words I don't know how to spell have been words I thought I knew how to spell :)

(dalmation, and chromosone... )

I love firefox's wiggly red line text box spelling checking. It's helped my online spelling greatly. Annoying that it's so American, but I could probably change that when I have time. I use ispell in emacs when I can, but I dislike it. Emacs should have wiggly red lines too! Ispell doesn't seem to be installed on chiark, but I haven't mentioned it yet because it may well be that I just don't understand about some subtlety about how emacs is set up.

FWIW, I found an British dictionary very quickly and installed it easily. I don't think my blood pressure could cope if 5% of my words were red because I wrote "XXour" or "ise" or "ize" :)

It's be interesting to actually measure what proportion of corrections are typos, words not in the dictionary, and words I don't know how to spell.

FWIW, I think they definitely come in that order for me, but I'm not sure about the proportions.

I use spell checking in three different ways. For work email (and probably a few other things which happen sufficiently rarely that I can't think of them right now) my application of choice has as-you-type checking turned on by default. This is moderately reliable, but does have occasional glitches (it failed to catch "histroy" the other day). For personal email, news, LJ and such like I rely on my generally good spelling and invoke a checker only when I get to a word I'm not sure about. Finally, for a longer document, in addition to that manual word-by-word check I'll run one over the completed work.

The most important element, however, is a human proof-read, because the majority of my errors are correctly spelled homophones of the desired word. And I still don't trust grammar checkers to have few enough false positives to be useful.

Oh, god. I'd forgotten about grammar checkers (thank goodness): all those "you seem to be using the passive voice" warnings, and reading age and sentence length scores. It's not the accuracy which bothered me, but its determination to turn the way I speak into the way someone else speaks.

I'm interested by the "perpetuate language fascism" thought. I think mine used to, in that I was hesitant about changing it in case I accidentally added something wrong to it and then did that forever... but now I just add whatever words I think are words.

Grammar checkers (or spelling checkers that also check grammar) do, very much so, which is (imho) definitely a bad thing. If they were grammar suggesters, they could be useful. If they made it clear that approximately 50% of their suggestions (or less in my experience) were useful, and you were just supposed to pick the ones that sounded right, eg. that the default button was "ignore", that's be good. They certainly can pick up some errors.

But many of the suggestions are flat out wrong, eg. misparsing a sentence and complaining that a non-agreeing noun and verb don't agree, or objecting to a word correctly used twice, etc. That just annoys people.

And most of the rest are way too prescriptivist and out of date. Eg. When writing fiction, many sentences would unarguably be shorter and clearer and nicer and better if they were rewritten with one of the nouns an active verb. But that's style. The other was correct English, this just sounds better. And it's in some percentage. A large minority of the time, the passive verb is the better style -- and in some contexts a large majority of the time.

But the grammar checker sounds like an N'th century prescriptivist, as if every passive sentence was an error as unarguable as using the wrong letter in a word.

I can’t be bothered spell checking a piece of writing if I have to repeatedly tell a program to spell check my writing.

Some programs I use probably have spell checkers available, but I can’t be bothered to find out how to install them.

If I am typing without a spell checker, I will usually type a word into Google if I am unsure of its spelling.

It annoys me somewhat that none of the IDEs I use spell check comments.

[x] The false-positive rate from a spell-checker is sufficiently high to be Bloody Annoying.

I'll spell-check a document that really must avoid mis-spellings (e.g my thesis), but I find proof-reading a better bet mostly.

Spellcheckers don't kill people perpetuate linguistic fascism, linguistic fascists do. I have the FF spellchecker on and appreciate it catching errors, but add words to its dictionary liberally.

Ironically (http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/junk/spellchecker.png).

Hmm, I have firefox 2 and wasn't even aware that it *had* a spellchecker.

And now that I am I can't work out how to turn it on. I've tried looking in the options and not spotted anything. I've tried searching in help (nothing) and in about:config (two options, one of which is related to number of mistakes, and the other of which seems to make no difference when I change it). At no point is anything I type here being picked up as an error (and I've definitely made errors!).

So how *do* you turn it on?

It's on by default, but I ignore it almost all the time, so whether that counts as "using" or not, I don't know.

All my spelling errors are typos rather than actually not knowing the correct spelling. Many of them aren't catchable because the kind of scientific vocabulary I use when writing a paper is poorly represented in the default dictionaries. In any case, typographical mutations that convert one word into another valid word aren't catchable.

I'm going to be daring and post this without a spell checker. I think I've metioned before that I'm dyslexic. The ironly that I have earned most of my money in the last 20 years as writer, is not lost on me. I am aslo mildly dyspraxic which means that even though I am a touch typist, I cna often swap around the key strikes across keys eg hitting i instead of e and g instead of h or typing whloe words out of turn like adn instead of and and teh instead of the etc. These are common typos but I do it all the tyme.

Interesting I have just typed tyme instead of time, normally I would immediately backsapce (darn - AGAIN god I had no idea how much I did the mistakes) and edit as I wrote. Dyslexia in action. So for most of this post I have backspaced when I have been suddenly aware of an error but I am not going to go back and correct - so you can see what a godsend a spell checker is for people like me. If ONLY I could have used oen at school, my grades whould (AGAIN) have been so much better.

I feel a bit odd being htis (AGAIN) honest in a post. I really wish they were a bit more canny though, and pcik (AGAIN) up common errors - perhaps there could be oversensitive mode and you could select it to churn up "did you mean form or from".

Now I am going to be brave, not read this back and post.

Clcik (AGAIN Grrr)

Send.

Right, have read back

Irony
also
can
Whole
one

I hide my dyslexia at work. I use spell check, proof read under a lamp with a ruler, and confide in one or two people who will proof read for me.

Interestingly I don't like the wiggly lines coz they break the creative flow. If you are mid thought, the last thing you need is to be thrown off by a o-god-how-the-hell-do-i-spell-that-moment. If you are writing fiction, I suggest switching off altogether and forgetting about it. The most important things, if I can use painting for an analogy, is to get the broad brush work done first, you can mop up the drips later.

Question - has anyone written a spell checker for dyslexics?

I rarely use a spell-checker because they have too high false-positive AND false-negative results for my satisfaction.

What she said. False positives tend to come from US english.

I didn't think I used a spell checker, but Konqueror has check-as-you-type enabled by default. I don't care enough to switch it off. OTOH I find I can't use the check-as-you-type in Word because the squiggly lines are so distracting.

I ticked "I don't care if I spell correctly or not" because I think that I type and spell sufficiently well that nobody will think I'm a blithering idiot, at least, not due to my spelling.

More reasons why I don't use a spell-checker:

Most of what I write it isn't terribly important if there are a few spelling or typographical errors.

Spell checkers won't spot if your error has created a valid word which is the *wrong* word.

Spell checkers don't reliably know enough words, and certainly don't know random bits of jargon and common abbreviations and slang, so you end up wasting a lot of time clicking "ignore".

And on LJ it's particularly bad because it doesn't understand HTML and attempts to check the spelling of the code too, and I write all my posts with the auto-format off, even if I don't usually bother for comments.

On this occasion the spell checker finds no actual errors and one false positive on "LJ". It's just not worth the time and effort.

I use real words that spell-checkers don't know more often than I spell words incorrectly in ways they could detect. Unless I were publishing something for wide circulation I wouldn't bother.

I will only ever run a spellchecker over things other people are going to want, eg. work or writing. I turn them off in OpenOffice because the little wiggly lines under my every typographical error just drive me up the *wall*. Plus going back and correcting typos by hand helps me think.

I have committed wrongness, and answered "yes" to both "Most of my spelling errors..." propositions. I have done this because they both constitute a significant proportion of my spelling errors, and without some kind of rigorous analysis, I couldn't tell you which was in fact the majority.

Since the advent of the Firefox spellchecker, my spelling, both observed and actual, has improved, as constant active correction teaches me all those difficult spellings that confuse my addled brain, and weeds out my every typo.

I basically never use a spelling checker. For the sort of thing I write there are usually lots of words not in the dictionary (technical terms, acronyms, etc). They don't catch grammatical errors, confused wording or any of the other things you might care about, so I have to proofread what I write anyway. And I'm lucky enough to have a brain which will readily identify spelling mistakes as it reads a piece of text, so it's easy to deal with them. Turning off the spelling checker was one of the first things I did when I upgraded to firefox 2 -- all those red lines were just annoyingly distracting.

The kind of mistake I found hardest to catch in proofreading was when I used speech recognition software; sometimes it would insert a similar sounding but wrong word; since these words were correctly spelled they simply didn't leap out at me the way typos do.

Most of my errors are leaving in or missing out words during editing, rather than spelling words wrongly. I have decided the way to make my work better is to get somebody else to proof read it. In a conference paper I recently wrote it came out with "pennycook" written at the end of one of the sections - that's part of one of my bibliography item labels, and I'm sure readers would have figured that out, but it still looked silly.

(Pennycook is the name of somebody who is very important in the field I'm writing about, who may well be at the conference the paper was for!)

believe it or not, it's the first time I've ever posted a poll!

In that case, you may be interested to know that the Poll Creator (http://www.livejournal.com/poll/create.bml) (which I assume you used, rather than coding the poll yourself) has more restrictive limits than LiveJournal itself.

Specifically, it restricts you to fifteen options per question and (I believe) fifteen questions per poll, when the "real" limits are 255 in each case. (I say this because I've seen several instances of "logical" questions being split over several "physical" questions because the poll poster didn't know that the fifteen-item limitation was only in the Poll Creator. Workaround: let it generate code for only fifteen items, then add the remaining items yourself before posting the poll. Or create the entire thing by hand, thought I've never bothered to do that.)

Also, the default "max-length" for text entry boxes is fairly low (40, I believe). I nearly never see a good reason not to change that to 255 (the width of the appropriate database column); it's VARCHAR, so even if the average length of people's replies is three characters, you're not wasting space by setting the max-length high.

(As for the "width", or whatever it was called again, it makes more sense to think about that, since it'll affect how wide the box appears on the screen and how much of what people type is visible to them at once.)

Thanks. In fact I was vaguely aware of most of that already, so if I had run up against a limitation of the Poll Creator I would have tried to find ways round it rather than changing the poll design to fit. It's unclear that I would have been immediately successful, since I think at least two aspects of the process were completely opaque to me until after I'd gone through it once (namely the fact that the HTMLish poll specification is excised by LJ at posting time and turned into an opaque reference to a poll number, and also that the output of the Poll Creator is pasted into the normal LJ posting interface for final adjustment by a human, rather than being immediately posted as the "post" button rather implied); but I'd probably have worked it out in the end, even if I had to resort to posting a visible-to-me-only poll and then trying again once I knew how it all worked.

What I would actually like is a grammar checker in my IRC client. Typos and spelling I don't care about: it's a transient medium with intelligent readers. But occasionally I find myself doing bizarre things like restarting the sentence, and I am not making this up, half way through a word, and only notice when someone says they can't parse it three lines later.

It'd have to be a grammar checker that could cope with typos (up to a point) and be liberal in ways that the breed stereotypically is not, mind.

At home I currently have Firefox's irritating American spellchecker because I haven't been bothered to poke it enough to turn it off yet. Most of the typing I do is into Notepad windows that have no spellcheckers, or Visual Studio windows that have syntax-checking rather than spell-checking (which is something of a pity as some developers have a habit of aiming for meaningful variable names and missing on account of spelling).