Made me look smarter — How Correctica
Service finds errors that spell and grammar checkers don’t.
When I write a post for Reglike, I act as researcher, writer and editor. That’s why you occasionally see a typo or two in articles. I review articles ahead of posting, and always pay attention to that red squiggly underline indicating a misspelled word, but some types of errors are harder to catch.
That’s why I was intrigued to learn regarding Knowingly, a fresh firm launched by futurist and former Demand Media Chief Innovation Officer Byron Reese.
Knowingly offers Correctica, a tool to scan your website for the types of errors that spell checkers don’t pick up and humans often mess up: compound words, misused phrases, homophones and the like.
How many errors will you find across Reglike’s 8,000+ posts?
A lot, it turns out. But it’s not as bad as I initially thought.
Correctica scanned my site and the firm provided a spreadsheet of errors divided into a number of categories, counting ones that are definitely wrong and need to be fixed as well as ones that are a bit trickier and require case-by-case analysis.
The scan uncovered over 3,000 errors. That’s more than I expected.
Once I started digging into the results, I learned that I haven’t done that poorly. Regarding 95% of the errors are in the comments, where people don’t re-read or check for grammar ahead of they click “submit”.
That stated, there were over a hundred errors that were all on me.
I described data as “fairly week” instead of “fairly weak”.
I wrote that something was coming “onto the seen” rather than “onto the scene”.
I also wrote regarding something without “further adieu” instead of “further ado”.
There was also the “sneak peak” someone gave me of their fresh software, which ought to have been a peek, not a peak.
My most common sin is apparently with compound words such as middleman, airtime and hometown.
Perhaps I ought to take solace in the fact that President Obama’s blog refers to working with both sides of the isle (instead of “aisle”) and the CDC’s website often calls prostate cancer “prostrate”.
Correctica seems like a good service for news organizations and sites that will be embarrassed by mistakes like these (such as corporate and political sites).
Pricing starts at $25 plus $19.95 a month for sites with fewer than 100 pages, which makes it a great deal for businesses with a limited web presence. Sites that churn out a lot of content pay more. For example, a site with 1,000-10,000 pages pays $800 plus a higher monthly fee. (I paid for the service.)
A key issue in today’s world of user reviews and comments is deciding where to draw the line between publisher and user-generated content. In my case, I decided to use the Correctica results to fix over 100 errors in my posts, but I left the comments alone.
That means that if one of my stories “peaked your interest” and you wrote a comment regarding how “your right” and I’m wrong on the “heals of” reading a story, then for “all intensive purposes” your comment will live forever.
