Quote:
Originally Posted by Pajamaman
Have you ever written a book? Have ever proof-read a novel-length book? Those little mistakes can be easy to miss. Words that are spelled right, but are the wrong word so the spell-catcher misses them. Missing words. It is hard to catch them all over 100,000 words.
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This is why a good word processor has the ability to turn on/off each of the five spelling dictionaries per language that are needed:
- Domain specific spell checking;
- 500-1,000 most commonly misspelled words. Ideally, user-customization is offered;
- The 100 most common homophone pairs/triplets, flagging each occurrence as a potential error;
- 5,000 - 10,000 most common words;
- The big list --- 100,000+ words. This is run only after the other spell-checkers have cleared the list;
This is also why your grammar checker needs to be able to:
- Use N-Gram checking;
- Construct sentence diagrams;
Tools that one usually has to run as stand alone, on a text file are:
- Concordance creation with frequency data. This picks up correctly spelled wrong words;
- List of character pairs, triplets, quads, and quins, with frequency data. This picks up strange/unusual occurrences of words. This tool can also be extremely difficult to use effectively. (I used this when writing a book, in English, about the Tao Teh Ching. Picked up every instance where «Teh» and «The» were used incorrectly;
Run all of those, correct the errors they pick up.
Then run them a second time.
Then use a text-to-speech program, to read the document to you. As oft as not, you will hear errors that made it past the other tools that you used.
However, all of those tools are prone to failure, when proofreading your own work. Which is why it is vital to have at least two other people do the proofreading.