5. Verb tense agreement
Spellcheckers also don’t know when you switch from past tense to present tense
in the same sentence:
I went to the store, and although I
saw her there I did not saw her car.
In this case, "saw" should be "see," but your trusty spellchecker
might skip over this. This mistake is easy to make, as past and present verb tense
can appear interchangeable. Reading a sentence out loud is a good way to find these
errors.
6. Words that change with a letter added
or removed
Here and her. This occurs a lot partly because the "e" and
"r" keys sit next to each other on the keyboard. It is easy to press the
"e" key after the "r" without noticing or to think you pressed
the "e" key when you didn’t. For example:
I went to here house.
This simple typo appears correct to a spellchecker, but not to the reader. Leaving
off the "e" at the end of words can also create correctly spelled words
incorrectly used:
If she came her from her house,
it would be faster.
Other common words in this category include fore and for. Avoiding
this error is usually a matter of taking your time with proofreading your work.
Breathe and breath. This is an example of a verb and noun with the
same origin. The similar spelling makes it easy to misuse these words. For example:
I took a deep breath and tried not
to breath too fast.
The spellchecker knows "breath" is spelled correctly, and does not know
that the sentence requires the verb "breathe."
7. Quotation marks
Simple quotes follow this format:
"I bought some eggs," she said.
She said, "I bought some eggs."
If you make a mistake in the above, your spellchecker will likely find it. Spellcheckers
will not find mistakes in longer quotes such as:
"I went," he said angrily
"to the store and bought some eggs."
Specifically, the spellchecker will not know that the sentence should have a comma
after "angrily" like this:
"I went," he said angrily, "to the store and bought some eggs."
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