Poor spelling makes you look less smart than you are! More often than not it is a sign of carelessness and hasty composition.

Please spell-check all of your discussion board posts, including Starting Assumptions, Interpretations, Reflections, and responses to other students.

Although there are some problems with spell-checkers, when used with care they can be very helpful (it's often hard to proof-read on-screen).

Spellcheck.net is a great free web page that will perform a spellcheck of pasted text. It's linked to at the bottom of every page in this site.

If you prefer a spell checker other than spellcheck.net, here are some other options:

• Windows only
  • IESpell (Internet Explorer).
  • Spellbound (Firefox)
     
• Macintosh only
  • In any OS X native application, just right-click or control-click on any highlighted word to lookup a word in the built-in Oxford American Dictionary and Thesaurus. Or, open Safari or any other native application and try this:
    • Place the cursor over any word, then hold down the Control and Command keys and press D (for Dictionary). The definition for your word from the Oxford Dictionary will appear as a pop-down window.
    • As long as you keep holding down the Control and Command keys, you can move the cursor over other words to see their definitions.
    • The pop-down window definitions include a "More" link; click it to open the Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus in its own window.
  • From the Edit menu, there is a submenu for Spelling. In the Spelling submenu, turn on "Check Spelling as you type." When you want to do a spellcheck of the document or any selected text, choose "Spelling..." from the same submenu. This Spelling submenu is a standard OS feature based on a system-level spell-checker; no need to download or install anything. It should work the same in all applications, whether Safari or Pages or Keynote or whatever.
    • Within Safari or any other application, if you want to quickly check the spelling of a single word, just double-click to select the word, then control-click (or right-click) the word. (You can also perform a Google search this way.)
  • Word Service, a free download from Devon Technologies, works with any native application in OS X. Choose Statistics from the Services menu and a pane will appear displaying a count of characters, spaces, words and lines, even for read-only text such as web pages and received emails. Word Service can do many other tricks, too, such as: insert the current date; sort lines in a list; convert between all caps, first caps, and lowercase; convert straight to curly quotes or vice versa; etc.
     
• Windows and Mac
  • Confluence has a little SpellCheck button you can use to check the spelling of your posts.
  • For online dictionaries and translations, consider Bartleby.com, Dictionary.com or Google language Tools, accessed through your web browser.

Wordcount exercise:

Copy the following paragraph (including parenthetical words) and paste it in to the wordcount field at wordcounter.net. When you see how many words it contains, go take the Wordcount quiz in the Orientation section at Desire2Learn.

Without the Greeks we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns—Corinthian, Doric, and Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth. One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intolerable. Achilles appears in the Iliad, by Homer. Homer also wrote The Oddity, in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured on his journey. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name. Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and threw the java. The reward to the victor was a coral wreath. The government of Athens was democratic because people took the law into their own hands. There were no wars in Greece, as the mountains were so high that they couldn’t climb over to see what their neighbors were doing.... (more) Eye halve a spelling chequer. It came with my pea sea. It plainly marques four my revue miss steaks eye kin knot sea. (more)

Wordcounter.net is a great free web page that will perform a spellcheck of pasted text. It's linked to at the bottom of every page in this site.

If you use a Mac and prefer a word counter other than wordcounter.net, try the following:

• Word Service, a free download from Devon Technologies, works with any native application in OS X. Choose Statistics from the Services menu and a pane will appear displaying a count of characters, spaces, words and lines, even for read-only text such as web pages and received emails. Word Service can do many other tricks, too, such as: insert the current date; sort lines in a list; convert between all caps, first caps, and lowercase; convert straight to curly quotes or vice versa; etc.