Spell check is an incredible tool, and has come a long way
since the days of DOS word processors, but it still lets some things through
because it can’t read. Spell check assumes that writers basically know what
they are doing, that the specific choice of words somehow makes sense because
the computer can’t know.
But I’ve been teaching for long enough that I’ve come to
recognize certain patterns that are definitely errors, and I’ve seen them often
enough to be tired of pointing it out. The solution I wrote into Alchemist was
simple, find the errors.
Most of these errors are from misused word phrases that
should be compound words, or misapplied phonetic pronunciations transcribed to
the document. So now there’s a way to flag ten plus misspellings of nowadays as
now a days, now and days, now of days, etc. Alchemist will flag misapplied
phonetics for should’ve, would’ve, and could’ve that somehow became should of,
would of, and could of, respectively, and many others.
Of course, this is hardly the limit of what it can find, and
this feature wouldn’t be much good if these were the only misspellings it could
catch. But Alchemist is flexible and allows for users to add new words.
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