Squirrels: Spell Check Won't Help You ...

... when you misspell a word that creates an unintended but correctly-spelled word. Like when you mean to write Lansing Community College (as in, a school of higher learning) and you accidentally write Lansing Community Collage (as in, a collection of images).

Spell check doesn't know you meant to write college. All it knows is collage is spelled right. So it says you're okay, when you're not.

We can use spell check as a complement to -- but not a substitute for -- re-reading our work, from start to finish, and checking facts and figures and names and spellings line-by-line and word-by-word, with our own eyeballs.

The aforementioned example actually happened to us in this exercise. Per the syllabus, anything that changes the meaning of a phrase, or any text error inside of a quote, and any misspelling of a proper name is a fact fatal. And a fact fatal is an automatic 1.0 on the assignment, no matter how well we do on everything else in an assignment.

That's because journalism isn't about writing; it's about getting it right. Especially what people tell us.

That's not the only scenario where spell check can trip you up. If you don't pay careful enough attention, spell check can also misspell names for you!

For example, let's say you write the name Adler. Adler a name, but it's not a word that's in the dictionary. So, spell check will probably flag Adler and suggest a change.

If you blindly click "okay" on everything spell check suggests that you change, odds are it'll change a name like Alder, which is a type of tree.

Sorry we had to learn these the hard way, folks. Yes, this happened, too. But let's learn from them, and not let them happen again.

A tip to avoid such fatals:When you finish writing, print out your story. Then, circle every noun (person, place or thing) and every number and/or statistical unit and the entirety of every quote. Then, get out your notes (or in this case, your book). Go through your story line-by-line, and as you come across a circled item, look up that circled item in your notes and/or book, and make sure in the story that it is exactly the same as what is in your notes and/or book. (For quotes, that means making sure it is exactly as-is.) Then X out each circled item as you check it. I promise you that if you do this in a serious, detailed manner, you will catch 95 percent of the fatals we've been seeing this semester.

But it only works if you do it, precisely and in its entirety and every time.

Early on in this class, I talked about how doing all the little routine things in journalism -- like thoroughly checking your work to make sure what you wrote was what you intended to write, and that it was accurate as compared to your notes and the facts -- was something that you could never take for granted. It's not.

And it has nothing to do with talent, just vigilance. In the same way American can have the best army in the world, it doesn't really matter if the one night the army takes the night off, Canada decides to invade us.

Or if we're trying to stay in shape, and instead of running our miles every day we start to cut corners and slack here and there. Eventually, the pounds will start showing.
 
The fact is, you could be the world's best journalist, and you still have to do all the little and annoying things -- like checking routine facts -- if you want to stay ahead of making mistakes. Because when you're processing thousands of words a day in a professional environment and on deadline, a mistake is always waiting to catch you at a lax moment and bite your ass.
 
It's why The New York Times has the best journalists in the world, yet they still have a copy desk.
 
So there's no big thing to learn from the fatals, other than if we want to do things the right way, we have to do things the right way completely and each and every time.
 
This job isn't about writing. It's about getting it right. We have to start making sure we're following all the steps, every time. No more short cuts. No more assumptions.
 
Each and every one of you is capable of doing this, and doing it well. But we need to do all the things we're supposed to do for that to happen.