Is your spell-check broken?

Here is my question: what is wrong with spellchecking? I mean really; who doesn’t use it? If you are talking about an e-mail to a friend, that is one thing, but if you are publishing something? Well, then you better use it.

In my (many) years of video game playing, the advent of the website GameFAQs has revolutionized gaming and made it so much easier to find out what games really have to offer. At the same time, it has been a boom to budding game aficionados that are seeking a little public notoriety. This is all great and I have taken advantage of a great deal of work that others have done. So for that, thank you!

There is a dark side to all of this, however. The people writing these FAQs and guides hate proper grammar, spelling, punctuation, or anything resembling traditional communication. It never appears to be out of spite or malice (besides the occasional ‘thru’), but simple carelessness. I’m not talking common grammatical issues, like two or to instead of too, but simply sloppy writing.

They also aren’t playing with grammar in any interesting way—I would accept Hemingway writing over Faulkner’s love of punctuation and additional clauses—but it just seems like they don’t know how to use it. But there is also an issue of consistency, so they can’t ever claim ignorance. It is possible that for many writers, English is a second language, as the site is obviously international and there is plenty of anonymity, but they are playing the American version of the game, not a European or Japanese version. They are likely in the U.S. writing for Americans.

The truth is that these people are writing 100-200 page documents that are riddled with errors; lots and lots of them. These documents are too long to be written directly online; they are clearly documents from a word processor. They just don’t use a spellchecking feature. Of course they like to draw pictures as if it were ASCII, which would make Word’s Spellchecker go crazy, but still! Why don’t they use it? It isn’t that hard—I use it to compose this blog. When I’m done, I read it over. And then I look for those angry red lines and I spell-check. Am I a dying breed?