Using Spellcheck

[patb44]

At this time I have received 3 feedback’s on a story that I submitted and it was posted on 07/26/03 the posted name of the story is "Paul comes home" the category is incest.

The reason I’m posting this message is in all 3 feedback’s they said I did not us my spellchecker that is part of Microsoft Word 7 along with its grammar checker. So when I have some one tell me my spelling is wrong then I start to wonder if my Office 97 is working the way it was designed to work.

I would hope the Moderator Killer Muffin could help me?

 

[KillerMuffin]

Hi!

I cut and pasted the first page of your story into my own copy of Word 2000. This is what I found:

Paragraph 1:

doughtier should be daughter

Paragraph 9:

through should be thought
high heals should be high heels

It goes on. You have a lot of homonym errors in your story. Heals instead of heels and lags instead of legs, for example. Your spell checker would not pick them up anyway. Homonyms frequently slip past the site's editor, too. I wouldn't blame your spell checker for it. It doesn't read meaning, it just checks strings of characters in your document against strings of characters in its dictionary.

What struck me the most, however, was the grammatical errors that made some of your sentences incomprehensible. Bad grammar has a way of highlighting spelling errors. Since most people can't define why or how grammar is bad, they tend to blame it on spelling.

Take the first sentence of paragraph 9:

Now 19 Paul thought back and remembered after that how often he through of his mother's hose and high heals.

It's painful to read, in a way.

Now 19, Paul remembered how often he thought of his mother's hose and high heels.

You can see how the sentence means the same thing, but the first one is so difficult to understand that it's incomprehensible.

My advice is to find an editor, if you can. The Volunteer Editor's program is available on the story index page if you're looking for it. You can also ask for editorial help here and in the Author's Hangout. One other thing that a lot of authors find helpful is to wait a week or more, then read their stories again. Errors are more obvious then. Of course, the longer you are away from the story, the easier it is to find mistakes in it.

Your story isn't bad, don't let anyone make you believe that. You just need a little bit of work in the mechanical areas.

 

[Rainbow Skin]

First, what KillerMuffin said is quite right. Spelling checkers are completely stupid, and as long as something is a word, any word, it'll get through. It's not a proofreader. You have to do the proofreading by yourself. The spelling-checker is only useful if e.g. you're not sure whether it's 'separate' or 'seperate'. It'll pick up some spelling errors--but it can't do proofreading.

But, second, yes there is something very strange with your setup. I don't know what you see, but what I see when you've written a simple apostrophe is a bizarre mix of symbols: a-circumflex, then euro, then trademark. I have no idea how it did that, but you need to check your settings.

Perhaps post a test line in your own user profile and just check what Literotica turns it into. I've never seen smart quotes turned into anything like that bunch of symbols before.

 

[Weird Harold]

But, second, yes there is something very strange with your setup. I don't know what you see, but what I see when you've written a simple apostrophe is a bizarre mix of symbols: a-circumflex, then euro, then trademark. I have no idea how it did that, but you need to check your settings.

The specific pattern of characters that show up inthe first post are what WordPerfect's version of smart quotes turns into when C&P into an HTML text field.

MS Word's smart quotes (and other special characters) usually turn into a square or Accented "foreign" characters.

I have seen the WordPerfect style special characters come from other programs, but Word Perfect is "the usual suspect" when I see those characters.