Minstrel

Minstrel

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

More reasons I hate Spell Check!


Claire and the Egotistical Rat Bastard is almost done.  YEAH!

It is now in the hands of a group who are reading, looking for inconsistencies and any other craziness that may have slipped past me.  I’m sure there are many.

This brings me to today’s topic.  Why I hate spell check.

I know, I’ve ranted about this before but every time I start to edit it attacks me all over again.

Now this time I didn’t get a lot of little colored squiggles for having a passive voice.  Thank you gods of micro soft!

First, I’ve been cleaning up Molly and the Vampire.  The one Amazon review I’ve gotten took off a star for my problems with homonyms.  She still gave me four stars but said I should use spell check.

I wanted to cry out to her, “But I did use spell check!” 

Now you see; that is part of the problem.  People have a weird notion that spell check actually knows what it’s talking about.  It doesn’t something that has been brought to my attention in a very painful way.  For example, loosing that star.

I have learned a lot about what the program will and will not help me with.  It will not distinguish between those pesky homonyms, and when I’m tired and frustrated I start accepting what it tells me.  BIG MISTAKE.  My reviewer thought that it would get things right. HA!.

I went through the manuscript three times searching for their, there, and they’re.  Lord I hope I got them all.

Spell check also hates normal conversation, at least the normal conversation between my characters.  Conversations between my people tend to be overrun with fragments.  I can’t help it if that’s the way they communicate and I will not be held responsible for what they tell me.

But there is something bigger that I just don’t understand at all.

When my hero Bran tells his friends that “My lady was intent on breaking my heart” Spell Check tells me it should be “My lady were intent on breaking my heart.” 

When “Molly had to give herself a mental shake” Apparently it should have been “Molly had to give her a mental shake.”  It left me wondering who had wandered into the scene and needed a mental shake.  

When Molly thinks that quirky people were usually fun, Spell Check decided that I had too many quirky people and that quirky people was usually fun.

But the one that really got me, the one that took me a couple of minutes to figure out was a scene between Bran and his friends Crow and Minstrel.  The line I wrote was; Both men were grinning at Bran who just looked puzzled.  I thought it made sense, but I was wrong.  It should actually have read, Both men were grinning oat Bran who just looked puzzled.

It was clear that at some point when I wasn’t watching my hero turned into a healthy breakfast cereal.

Molly is going to be very disappointed.