Proofread, proofread, proofread

Be vigilant, and don't let the vassals get you.

Hey, everyone!

The first thing I remember learning in Mrs. Schlappy's kindergarten class was, "Lenny! Stop eating paste!" The second thing I learned was spelling words like I and am. As I advanced through my "elementary career," the vocabulary became longer and more arcane, but the spelling principle was the same; stack one letter after the other until the teachers booted me from the mandatory spelling bee.

Who needed a hyperbole anyway? My family was poor, and regular bowls were all we could afford; those insensitive lugs!

Learning to spell

I always paid more attention to girls in class than to rules like I before E, except after C, except for all the times it isn't, so my spelling eventually became quite good. The girls in my school loved spelling bees.

Most of us probably started practicing spelling on our first day of elementary school before our bums could warm our desk-chair combos. My teachers ingrained spelling into me through writing assignments, spelling tests, and horrifying ire when I accidentally wrote the spoonerism for fitted sheet in one of my journal assignments. I'm sure your educations were similar.

If our brains were a tree, spelling would be the taproot. Spelling is such a foundational part of our knowledge it's almost autonomic. Or at least we'd like to think that it is. And therein lies the problem. We all make spelling mistakes all the time. It's what we do afterward that's important.

Here's the opening paragraph of an eBook by an amateur author I know, which I read recently.

I didn't know that fruit could hold land by feudal tenure while squatting on fine oak, but apparently, that's a thing in this particular fantasy novel.

This book isn't a comedy, so I'm sure the imagery of half-rotten fruit toiling over their fine oak fields to eke out an existence as a reward for allegiance wasn't what the author was going for. Unfortunately, he started his story with this spelling blunder instead of hiding it on page ninety-seven under a pile of backstories like a professional author would do.

Proofreading and why you should do it again

Spelling errors happen to everyone. And if people subscribed to Mark Twain's notion, "Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks imagination," instead of reading everything in the most pedantic and uncharitable ways possible, they wouldn't be as damaging to our writing as they are.

We think about spelling as much as we think about breathing without realizing our spelling suffers from chronic emphysema. Therefore, reading and re-reading and re-reading again, even after using a good spellchecker, is always a good idea.

The challenge

I've lost count of how often I've had to edit a blog post to fix my spelling. Grammar issues jump out at me while reading out loud, but spelling errors lurk in the shadows and are harder to see. So be vigilant with your writing, and don't let those spelling errors sneak out like gas on a date. You don't need them stinking up your prose and chasing your readers away.

For today's challenge, using a pen and paper, write a paragraph or two about the best thing that has happened to you this week. Then, type what you wrote into a word processor and see if you caught all your spelling errors.