Timewaster's Guide Archive
Local Authors => Brandon Sanderson => Topic started by: ryos on May 24, 2010, 08:45:18 PM
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This is just an idle curiosity.
I've seen Brandon post to his twitter that he had to "run spellcheck" on Towers of Midnight. I've seen Patrick Rothfuss post the same to his blog, mentioning that it takes some six hours for him to spell check en entire novel.
My reaction is still "WTF? I haven't 'run spellcheck' since, oh, 1998, when they started doing it for you as you type." Is there a reason why authors don't use inline spell checking, or is it just a personal preference?
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I don't know about the published authors, but I know I have that turned off for my own novels. some words it auto corrects, but most of them you have to select which word exactly you want. Also, I usually have it turned off so that it's not distracting me while I write, and instead I can focus on just getting the story pounded out. If I take time to spell check I might lose a groove I'm in.
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He's probably talking about running a manual spell check in order to prevent easy copyediting mistakes. Sure, you have to skip through or add a lot of in-world terms to your dictionary to do it, but it's probably worth the time to keep the book immersive.
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You can always add an extra dictionary dedicated to each book/series so that the coined terms not only don't throw errors, you can insure you spelled them consistently throughout.