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Journal Cliff's Journal: Even Professional Writers Mis-Spell 13

Journal by Cliff
And I am hardly a professional writer. I've heard several Slashdot nay-sayers say that because I'm making a (meager) amount of money off of this job that I should be perfect.

Pah!

Editors (all editors...not just the Slashdot variety) are human, and thus, we make mistakes. We don't mean to make mistakes, but we do. Sometimes it's not catching a link to add to a particular story; in other cases it's editorializing when such editorializing is unnecessary, or unwanted; however this all is overlooked by one of the most popular "bones" that some Slashdot readers like to pick:

Spelling.

To those who think that spelling is everything in this day and age of (non-perfect) spell-checkers, I provide this example of why I will no longer feel like complete and utter shite when people catch my inevitable spelling errors. For those too lazy to click on the link (and for posterity), here's the piece in particular:

"The small Webcasters that we heard form in North Carolina did not feel like they had been part of discussions," said Joe Lanier, Helms's aide. "They were concerned that even under this bill they would not be able to survive."

Now remember, this is from Reuter's! Real professional writers! And I can entirely see how that could have happened and slipped thru the cracks there because I've committed some of the same errors as well! Time, sometimes, is everything, and when you are typing out copy at a fast rate to beat those deadlines, deadlines, DEADLINES! sometimes, these things happen.

Mind you, I'm not going to try any less harder in preventing them, I just won't feel so bad in the eventuality that I do, accepting the fair criticisms as just that.

As a general rule, as long as we learn from our mistakes, we will grow into better people.

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Even Professional Writers Mis-Spell More

Even Professional Writers Mis-Spell

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  • Most everything should be put through a spell-checker if it appears on the front page. If 'from' should have been 'form,' that's fine, I understand. When the spell-checker brings up 'DCMA' and while its staring people in the face, they click 'ignore,' that is very sloppy work. CmdrTaco can continue to say this is his site and the journalism will remain casual. Spelling nazis like myself can and will continue to argue this site should be above such an amateur level.
    • Not just "most everything," but everything. Given a choice between correcting spelling or grammar, spelling is much easier to get right.

      At worst it would be nice if there was an actual editor of Slashdot. The difference--I believe--between "real" editors and /. editors is that the real ones don't write the articles; that's the writers's job [hey, now - this is CMS, so back off! :P ]. The editor simply butchers work with the his blue pencil.

  • Don't tell me that slashdot editors go home every night with a tears in their eyes because a few people with way too much time to waste have to pick apart each and every article for rampant spelling and grammar mistakes. If so, then perhaps it makes the meager pay worthwhile.

    Besides, I could draw up a slightly humorous comic with this exact premise. I say you guys should be embedding more misspellings in your articles! :)

    • But it's nice to be vindicated by the same faux-pas occuring in the major press. And it's a real easy thing to do and miss them in the checks as well. I have to admit to a bit of temporary dyslexia when I type (and read) every once in a while. I think people kind of have filters for those particular kind of mistakes and kinda read over them. C'mon. How many of you have typed "taht" instead of 'that'. I even have an auto-replace for that in X-Chat along with "teh" for "the".

      Ah, the perils of maintaining a high WPM count.

      • I have noticed that some versions of MS Word actually take to point out each and every occurrence of common spelling and grammar mistakes within a document, whether or not the mistake actually exists!

        Fairly annoying, though somewhat handy.

        Almost every major word processor (well, StarOffice and MS Word at least) allow for automatic replacement of mispelt words.

        Of course this does not account for poor public education. I had my spell checker setup to make sure "a lot" as "alot". It was not until the grammar nazis online yelled at me for a few years about it (hey, I didn't get WTF they where talking about, LOL!) that I realized my mistake.

        Note I was never marked down for it on any of the papers I turned in for my LA classes. *sigh*

        • Well... (Score:2)

          by Cliff ( 4114 )
          For the curious, Slash DOES have a spell-checker, now. It's just not quite as advanced as most of those used by web processors since HTML is a limited beast and HTML's GUI controls are even worse. Due to these two things, we only get a list of words that are mispelled: no search and replace, and no nifty highlighting.

          Hey! We didn't even have that about a year and a half ago. I consider this progress! ;)

            • For the curious, Slash DOES have a spell-checker, now. It's just not quite as advanced as most of those used by web processors since HTML is a limited beast and HTML's GUI controls are even worse. Due to these two things, we only get a list of words that are mispelled: no search and replace, and no nifty highlighting.


            I check everything I post at www.spellcheck.net. :)

            No, seriously. I have OCD and, err, I check everything I post, hehe.

            Well except for those nights when I am too tired to even see the screen, and one might tend to ask why I am even posting then, heh.
          • I do this myself a lot: echo whatever_word_whose_spelling_im_concerned_about | ispell -l

            You could probably pretty easily pipe an html document through "ispell -l | grep -v "<" | grep -v ">" | grep -v http" and that would filter out all the html tags (attached to either an < or >) and links.

            ispell isn't perfect (it has stemming problems, and with -l won't offer suggestions) but it would quickly print out questionable words which you could then glance over and decide if any of them were worth fixing.

            Of course, upon rereading your post, it looks like you guys are already doing this. So I guess I have to amend what I'm saying. I've had discussions with fellow slashdotters about this: add it to the output of the preview post pages. If I click "Preview" and am faced with two sections, the preview of my post, and a list of "questionable" words, it would go a long way to fixing stupid typos and misspellings, and generally lessen people's attitude towards grammar and spelling mistakes within stories and comments.

            In addition, it really wouldn't be too hard to grab the output and highlight the words within the text. ispell -l places the misspelled words, one per line, as its output. Just grab the words and do a regexp search-replace (come on, this is *easy* in perl) within the text, replacing word $1 with <b>$1</b> where $1 is just the current line of text returned from ispell. Yes, this will highlight a few false-positives, but it would be spectacularly helpful. [ispell -l confirms that I spelled spectacularly correctly :)]

            Anywho, just a few thoughts from this random rambler.

            • Upon closer inspection of ispell -l, it turns out that it treats non-alphanumerics as whitespace, so the greps I listed above will not work.

              Then the easiest way to deal with html tags is to copy the original text, strip the tags from the copied text, run the new copied and stripped text through ispell -l, and then run the replacement on the original text (being careful not to replace strings within an html tag).

              Other than that, my original post holds (unless there's something remarkably stupid that I've overlooked).

              • :)

                <SARCASM>
                Suggestion received. I liked it so much, I've gone back in time and implemented it in Slash!
                </SARCASM>

                Seriously, that's a good thought, and it's something Slash has done for the past few months. It's not perfect, though. There will be times when spell checkers will fail because the word is not mispelled, it is misused. I provide you with this embarassing example [slashdot.org] of such a situation. "thing" is a properly spelled, but the proper word should be "think".

                One I missed while trying to get articles up at 5 o'clock in the morning.

                Foolish, foolish me!

                • Heh, no problem. I understand completely what you're saying, and I wasn't making the comment with any intention of you actually taking me up on idea. After all, it's not even really my idea, just my presentation.

                  I just needed to get it down in writing for my own sake. But since it appears that I was not as clear as I would have liked to be, I'll try and clear things up a little for the sake of anyone reading this thread. [i.e. feel free to stop reading here if you want :)]

                  Let me start with a little disclaimer: Don't even consider implementing a spell-checker now, just play with the idea. Since slash has the capability for spell checking, you obviously could have implemented it already if you really felt like it. So I'm sure you have your reasons for not doing so at this point in time. What follows are the reasons I think having one would be a good idea.

                  My first point is that there is a substantial user base which wants at least semi-automated spell checking of their own posts. Just a list of possibly misspelled words. When you click preview, you see your post and you see any blatant spelling errors. This is not a substitute for proofreading, just gentle hand holding. After all, people rarely notice their own spelling mistakes. The word highliting I mentioned is a frill (I only brought it up previously because someone else mentioned it [you?] and it got me thinking about easy ways to tackle the problem) and not necessary by any stretch of the imagination.

                  My second point is that implementing that simple spell checker on the user end would go a long way to alleviate users' perception about editorial mishaps. And I would bet a bunch of money that you editors would like it if people stopped complaining about those stupid, inconsequential, and minor said mishaps. My reasoning behind this is twofold, a) users would actually see spell-checking capabilities on slashdot and b) users would see how easy it is to make mistakes even when using a spell checker. You'd think people would understand this, but apparently it just isn't the case. Once you have a spell-checker and make the same mistakes, it's just that much harder to go out and rant about someone who has only done the exact same thing.

                  That's my case. I'm not saying slashdot needs to implement a spell-checker. I'm not saying you can get close to, or should even attempt to get close to, a perfect spell-checker. I'm just saying that there are lots of people out there who want something simple which will jump on braindead misspellings which happen when one posts at 5am after no sleep or during a nice long rant. Adding a simple user spell checker to the preview post pages would go a long way, both for the users and for the editors.

                  • As I was saying before, Slash does implement a rudiementary spell-checker, but only for story editing. It would probably be trivial to extend this to comments, but I'm not quite sure if anyone on the programming team has the time to do the work.

                    Patches, of course, are always welcome.

                    So with this said, maybe it's best that someone makes this a formal feature request, and rather than provide a link and ask you to do it, I've gone and done it myself. You can find that request (and any subsequent discussion on it), here [sourceforge.net].

                    For those of you who have SF.net accounts and would like to see features added to Slash (or at least considered for addition to Slash), then feel free to submit them using this link [sourceforge.net].

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