Proofread past the spellcheck

An email once went out to about a quarter of a company with the word incontinence in it. The writer had meant inconvenience, the spellchecker had offered its confident suggestion, and — without reading the word it was about to install — they accepted.

That’s the failure mode nobody’s software will save you from. Spellcheck confirms that a word is spelled; only you can confirm it’s the word you meant. Read the email yourself before it goes.

Real words in the wrong places

The betrayals people described all share a shape: they’re real words, correctly spelled, sitting in exactly the wrong place. A single dropped letter turned a warm “Hello” into a bare “Hell” — grammatically flawless, tonally unforgettable. A form email went out still wearing its “Dear valued customer” placeholder. One person botched a professor’s name in the opening line and was embarrassed about it. Not one of these would trip a checker, because a checker has no idea what you meant — it only knows what’s in the dictionary.

The fix is old-fashioned and takes half a minute: one deliberate read, all the way through, at the pace of speech. Read the greeting and the name especially — errors love the first line, because it’s the line writers skip when rereading. If it’s important, read it once more where the stakes are visible: just before the address goes in, or while it waits in a delayed outbox.

The machine checks the spelling. The meaning was always your job.