Spell Check is Not a Replacement for Proofreading

We are a professional legal transcription services company. Words are our life. One thing we know for sure: Spell Check is not your friend. Do not, under any circumstances, rely on it as your sole source of proofing to make your transcripts look good.

Spell Check has a very limited, very narrow function and that is simply to alert you to misspellings. That’s it. So sure, it works great for typos, but if you email a quick note to a colleague asking for the pear of files on the Johnson case, that little gem slides right through the error check.

Case in point: An excerpt from “Candidate for a Pullet Surprise,” a poem by Mark Eckman and Jerrold H. Zar:

I have a spelling checker.
It came with my PC.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea.
Eye ran this poem threw it,
Your sure reel glad two no.
Its vary polished in it’s weigh,
My checker tolled me sew.

There really is no substitute for careful proofreading to review for errors that automated machines just can’t detect. The English language is full of weird rules and subtleties. Words have multiple meanings and words with very different meanings can sound the same when spoken aloud. It is one thing to write—another entirely to make sure what’s written is right.

And maybe we’re in the minority, but we do judge a bit when we read through a supposedly finished legal transcript full of errors that got through Spell Check but would not have passed the careful scrutiny of a professional proofreader. Maybe the legal transcriptionist is crazy busy, or maybe he or she is just not very knowledgeable on the subject, or maybe that transcriptionist doesn’t use a proofreader. In any case, poor quality work reflects on the professional; make no mistake about that.

Some people think that scoping and/or proofreading are extra, even unnecessary, steps in creating transcripts. We disagree. We think proofreading provides a polish to even the most well-written document. If you care enough to transcribe it, then you should care enough for it to be the very best copy it can be, write?