How my spell-check boycott is going

One of my favorite quotes from one of my former violin teachers is "you can't do quality control and production at the same time." She was referring to violin-playing. Maybe this isn't so odd, but whereas I am a lousy proofreader of my own writing, I was much better at being critical of my own playing. In fact, I suspect I drove my private instructor nuts, b/c she'd have me play whatever piece I was working on, and every time I made a mistake (which was every few measures or every few notes), I'd stop and correct myself. She wanted me to "stop worrying" about my mistakes and just play through the piece. HA!

I told her that every time I made a mistake and didn't correct it on the spot, it felt like I had a pebble in my brain. Pretty soon, my brain felt like it was full of these pebbles, which clouded my thinking. I would periodically get the urge to empty my brain of all of these pebbles and want to go back and fix my mistakes. She said she understood, but still wanted me to just play the entire section (production), and then go back and fix the mistakes (quality control). I understood the theory of her quote and appreciated it, but it was just hard to put to practice.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about "boycotting" spell-check. It' s not entirely a boycott, since I still need it, but I turned the auto red line feature off. I've always had it off for email, but I turned it off for this blog as well as other things, just so that it would encourage me to look up spellings of words I'm uncertain about and become a better editor of my own work. Plus I was sick of it offering to spell-check even my 3-line evite response.

I am pretty good about proofreading other people's works, but it amazes me how bad I am at proofreading my own work. I think it's because I don't read it as carefully or perhaps I project what I expect to find or something, but for whatever reason, I am lousy at it.

So how has my boycott been going?

Well, on the one hand, I'm happy to say that I've become less lazy about checking spelling, and it has forced me to become a better proofreader.

But on the other hand, this (from my previous post) is exactly why still need to keep the auto red-line feature off. Perhaps permanently. Stupid mistakes of this kind that I tend to overlook, when I rely on spellcheck to do my proofreading for me:

"As in, soup (though truth be told, I probably by it more frequently in paper cartons, since the canned type tend to be high in sodium)."

Golly. A fifth grader can do better.

It has now been corrected in my original post. But I'd like to get to a level where I can detect such silliness before I publish.