Spell Check - An Evil Tool

Let me start by admitting that I'm a terrible speller. In grade school I was always first-round knockout material in the spelling bee, stumbling over the simple words like breth and allready. I would go so far as to change a word in a sentence rather than risk getting it wrong. Things didn't improve in later years, when I was confronted with the added burden of writing book reports and papers containing even more words. This was when I discovered that I'm also a terrible editor. I see what my brain expects me to see. If I wrote "vassal" when I meant to write "vessel", no amount of review would expose the mistake.

The inability to spell or edit the written word makes for a poor foundation for a budding writer. Creativity and vocabulary can only make up for so much of the "fingernails on the chalkboard" reaction to repeated spelling mistakes. Errors of any form tend to derail the reader's involvement in a story, which is why I saw the advent of spell-check as my literary savior. Not only did my digital English teacher point out my mistakes, but she corrected them for me as I was typing, leaving me free to unleash a torrent of words as fast as my fingers could butcher them. No longer having to worry if "I" came before "E" regardless of where the letter "C" happened to be hanging out. It was like being free of the times tables after the invention of the calculator.

As with the fallacy of a free lunch, users of spell-check must pay the price for its convenience. This payment comes in the form of blissful ignorance - with no little red squiggles underlining my text, I saved the document knowing that every word on the page had been vetted for accuracy by my personal expert speller. It was not until my manuscript had past the point of no return, printed, bound and distributed that one reviewer pointed out today that "Fisichella did make the common mistake in his book of referring to a 'principle investigator' instead of a principal investigator'." Ouch! The question now is, short of a personal phone call, how do I make every reader understand that it was the fault of the little man in the box, not me. I know the whole 'principal is your pal' thing, but somehow I don't think anyone will believe me. Especially anyone who had seen my third grade spelling tests.