Even wizards need spell checkers

The trouble with spelling checkers, as I've been telling my younger daughter (who is currently struggling with a report for school), is that they can tell you that a word is spelled correctly, but they can't tell you that it's the wrong word.

"Very" -> "vary"; "pictures" -> "pitchers" -- very consistently, too.

I think the problem is that kids don't read as many books as those of us who grew up before computers and video games did. If you read a lot (and you're not dislexic) you eventually get a feel for when a word is 'wrong', even if you don't know exactly why it's wrong.

These days, of course, a lot of the reading we do is online, and that doesn't help. Most of it (including this post!) goes straight from the author to the reader with no second opinion from an editor. Worse than useless.

Having something you've written dissected in excruciating, embarrassing detail by a professional editor is humbling, but there's nothing better for one's writing.

For programmers, of course, the computer largely serves that function. For many, in fact, it's the fact that there's no human involved -- the computer is completely impartial -- that's so attractive. (For many others, of course, it's the opposite.)

Of course, the computer is also completely insensitive to style. If the program works (on the few cases you tested) the computer isn't going to tell you that it's an unmaintainable rat's nest that you only got working in the first place by pure dumb luck.

Can you tell that I just spent all morning refactoring some particularly ill-designed code I wrote two years or so ago? I'll be at it most of next week, too.

I hope Emmy's report doesn't turn into an all-nighter. It's due tomorrow, of course.