Two Proofreading Mistakes Microsoft Word Won't Catch

I use Microsoft Word to write my articles. Partially because I do it for the spell-checking and grammar checking capabilities, and the 2007 version does a word count as you type. So I'm always aware of how many words I'm typing and how many words I have left before I need to submit an article. Right now I'm at word 76 ... 77 ... 78 ... OK, let me stop ... 83 ... but seriously, it is just convenient. I've been able to publish quite a few articles, and I'm noticing there are some things that Word hasn't caught and neither has human eye until way after the fact. I have to say ... proofreading is something that should be done with four eyes, not two.

One of the mistakes I've made that Microsoft Word didn't catch was words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings. These are called homophones. For example, if I meant to right the word write but wrote rite instead. (Did you catch the example in that sentence?) Things like that Microsoft Word won't catch because the words are spelled correctly and they are used correctly in a grammatical sense. The sentence should have read, "if I meant to write the word rite but wrote right instead." My wife has came back and told me a couple of times about that particular error. In the English language it's not incorrect, but it's not what was intended to be written. If you read through it phonetically you may not even notice the error and in Word you won't get the red or green squiggly lines to indicate an error has happened.

Another one would be in a sentence like this, "ill enter the door on the left." Did you notice what the mistake is there? First word ... ill should be I'll. Word isn't smart enough in that situation to catch the difference between the future tense "I'll" and the word synonymous to sickness "ill." This is probably the only case where this is a problem, but it's still something to look out for in case there actually is more than one instance of this grammatical and spelling problem.

You really need to be careful of these kinds of proofreading mistakes if you have the auto-correct feature on. Sometimes Microsoft Word will auto-correct a word that's not supposed to be auto-corrected and then you have the wrong word that's spelled right and grammatically correct. Let's face it writers, Microsoft Word is great, but it's not perfect. It just pays to read and re-read your material before it hits the publishing stage so that you're not getting a reminder that you had a typo somewhere. It's always amazing to me how we can catch things in other people's writing but tend to overlook the things in our own ... 482.