What to do about Spelling?

English is not my mother tongue, but still I want to write my blog in this language, first to train my eloquence and second to reach a wider audience. After writing some posts, I came to the idea, well maybe you should start and check your spelling. I did a quick research and came up with Respelt, an online spell checker. And, I was bummed out… Somehow it felt like back in school.

I started to do some spell checking on my blog and repairing some of the bloody mistakes. Who writes “completly“? I do. Completly stupid! I know, how annoying it is to read blog posts full of spelling mistakes and what – like it or not – you think about the author of such blog posts. Bloody idiot!

I started to wonder, if there are some WordPress plugins around, which might help me.  Well one comes along with Jetpack. But I didn’t want to use Jetpack since its quite a huge plugin and I like them slim. After some research I found TinyMCE Spellcheck, which is a fork of the plugin, which was incorporated into Jetpack.

TinyMCE Spellcheck at work:

TineMCE Spellcheck inserts a new button into your WordPress editor, like one of the buttons in Word or OpenOffice. By clicking this button, your text will be searched for spelling errors.

It is a great plugin and I will use it from now on to get rid of at least the worst mistakes I do. If you look for the reviews, you will find mainly five-star reviews. Only the user “Bike” finds a critical point:

Great to have a non-Jetpack spellchecker and the basic functionality works great. However since 3.9, the spellchecker leaves all kinds of < span class=”hiddenSpellError” > references in the HTML, the moment you switch it on; bloating the code, breaking shortcodes and embeds and much more.

Therefore currently unusable unless you remove all of these Spans manually, which is a ton of work as all unknown words are marked as well.

So, I had a look into my source too, in order to find out.

Indeed TinyMCE Spellchecker leaves some HTML elements, which nobody wants. But in the moment, you turn off the spellchecker, the plugin removes these SPAN elements. What I will do from now on:

1. Write my blog post
2. Turn on the spellchecker to get rid of the mistakes
3. Turn it off again
4. Publish the corrected blog post with no SPAN elements in it.

A bucket of best wishes to Matthew Muro, who made this plugin available. 5 stars.

Photo Credit:

1. „Craie1“ von Jean-Jacques MILAN – Created by Jean-Jacques MILAN. Licenced under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.