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Subject:Re: Life Threatening Situation! From:"D. Margulis" <ampersandvirgule -at- WORLDNET -dot- ATT -dot- NET> Date:Wed, 10 Jun 1998 19:29:13 -0400
John and all,
While others have addressed the Word-specific behavior you reported and
solved your problem, there is more to say about spell checkers (not the
usual rant about their uselessness for people who don't already know how
to spell).
All of the spell checkers that I am aware of behave much the same way
Word's does. That is, they look up each word as soon as you type any
terminating character (punctuation other than hyphen; space). In Word's
case, it marks the word for you with a squiggly red line, so you are
aware of the behavior; but all of the others do it the same way,
inserting an invisible marker at the beginning or end of any suspect
word, on the fly.
Later, when you run the spelling program, it does not rescan all words;
it just looks for the invisible markers.
The consequence of this behavior is that if you inadvertently accept a
word (because of a trigger finger), you remove the marker and the word
in question is forever deemed acceptable, whether it is correct or not.
Programs do vary in the way they handle global acceptance, custom
dictionaries, grammar checking, and other features; but I am not aware
of any that will rescan a word once you have accepted it. What you
should take away from this is:
1. Don't get into a reflex mode in which you just keep clicking the
Accept button. Slow down and read the word.
2. If you do inadvertently accept something you didn't mean to accept,
stop the spell checker and go back for the bugger immediately, while you
still stand a chance of finding it.
3. Don't be shocked if you get all done and someone finds a typo despite
your carefully following the preceding rules. With luck, the someone
will be you, but we all know how hard it is to proof our own work. Just
smile and thank them for the good catch.
Just my two cents,
Dick
John Hughes wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
>
>
> On closer inspection I could see that some typos and spelling mistakes
> hadn't been corrected. I don't rate my editing skills against Word's
> ability, so as you can imagine, I'd like to get the spell checker
> working properly again. I wonder if anyone out there has a solution? I
> am using Word 7.
