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Is your Spelling Check in the Mail? - Comments Page 2
Article comments
26 - Aaman
Heh - that 'ghoti' slipped by me:)
27 - SFC SKI
Talking about the one that got away? Well, you got the second part of catching ghoti down.
28 - james mclafferty
Hi Duane:-)this post has turned into quite a bit of fun,we simply call our spelling bees "spelling tests",which i find simple and straight to the point.
29 - SFC SKI
"Bee: Etymology: perhaps from English dialect been help given by neighbors, from Middle English bene prayer, boon, from Old English bEn prayer "
In the old days, quilting bees were communal efforts, perhaps spelling bees borrowed the term from this practice, in the sense of a community competition.
30 - James Mclafferty
There are just some words that are easily confused like their and they're.And words that are spelt the same but have two different meanings like "live"eg:I live in england, or another is my god is this a live radio station?.Why do americans drop the "u" in colour?, any history to it?
31 - Margaret Romao Toigo
Spelling bees are contests in which children take turns trying to spell words aloud. They are eliminated from competition when they spell a word incorrectly. The child who is left at the end is the winner and usually receives a small prize like pencils, erasers or notepads.
Spelling bees are usually not optional in classrooms, but they do not count toward grading as they are intended to be spelling exercises that help the students prepare for their spelling tests.
A Yahoo! search on the string ["movable type" "spell checker"] returns many results that contain various requests (and complaints) for a spell checker for Movable Type.
I did find one possible Movable Type spell checker solution called MTSpeling.
I cannot speak for the quality of this solution or the ease of its implementation (it has only been tested with Movable Type version 2.51 and also requires International Ispell 3.1 or later and Lingua:Ispell, a Perl module), but it might be worth looking into -- if it has not already been tested and scrapped by Blogcritics' IT folks.
32 - SFC SKI
Spell checkers are great tools but no substitute for a good grasp of the language and a large vocabulary. Context has a lot to do with word usage, as well. (Sorry, it 's a pet peeve with me, especially as it's a major distractor in reading translations.)
33 - bhw
I looked at MTSpeling a couple of years ago. For a non-technical person like myself, it was extremely difficult to figure out how to install. Philip would probably understand it. But I went looking for other options and found IESpell. Sayonara, MTSpeling.
Our BC application has almost no real MT code left in it. Philip has rewritten it, so MT plugins don't usually work.
Besides, IESpell and Spellbound are incredibly simple to install and use. I'm not sure why anyone would want to have another MT plugin to deal with, anyway.
34 - Margaret Romao Toigo
SFC SKI is right, spell checkers are no substitute for a good grasp of language and vocabulary (and spell checkers don't correct the usage of homophones like there, their and they're), but they do catch common typographical errors such as flipped or missing letters.
bhw, I'm not sure why anyone would want to have another plug-in either as having too many features usually causes more bugs.
But the question came up and I looked into it because Blogcritics' editors seem to be somewhat concerned about the grammar and spelling in posts here and some of the posters here do not appear to be terribly interested in implementing client-side spell checking solutions.
35 - bhw
Yeah, I can't explain why posters wouldn't want the client spell checkers. They can be used in any web form.
36 - Margaret Romao Toigo
I can understand why non-technical people might be intimidated by the non-automatic -- and sometimes rather mysterious -- process of downloading and installing software from the Internet.
Not everyone has a knack for understanding such things, especially when the documentation is often sparsely written by technical people who assume that all users have the same level of skill as they do.
What I do not understand is why some people do not seem to care about checking their spelling whether the spell checker is client or server side.
37 - Margaret Romao Toigo
I can understand why non-technical people might be intimidated by the non-automatic -- and sometimes rather mysterious -- process of downloading and installing software from the Internet.
Not everyone has a knack for understanding such things, especially when the documentation is often sparsely written by technical people who assume that all users have the same level of skill as they do.
What I do not understand is why some people do not seem to care about checking their spelling whether the spell checker is client or server side.
38 - jarboy
#21 "I'm less interesting sober."
spoken like a true alcoholic!
blogwear should have spellcheck built in. until it is, i won't be spell cehcking.
39 - James Mclafferty
Thanks for the explanations of what your spelling bees are about Margaret. Totally interesting reading but i think if they were over here in the uk the kids who came last would be unfairly ridiculed which is why i don't necesarily agree with the competitive side of american schools.American kids seem to be forced to grow up quicker than other parts of the world.To a certain degree competitiveness is a good thing but everything from the "got to be cool to get in sororities",to the "got to be beautiful to be a cheerleader" side of it seems a bit harsh and people i imagine will be left behind in life with all this going on.Please ignore any bad grammar it's 22:32 in the evening and i'm dog tired.