One of the most annoying things in a blog is when it is full of basic spelling mistakes. It gives an impression of a lack of care for the readers. It looks as though the work has just been thrown up onto the page and forgotten about without even a cursory glance at the spellings. So, how can you spell check your blog?

One way is to draft up all of your posts in a tool such as Word. However, if, like me, you are often out when you are writing (how many posts did I write last year on the M6???) then your machine might not have such a tool, and it is a pain having to write it up and then copy it across. It is much better if you can add a spell checker to your blog.

Inbuilt Browser Spell Checker
Well tools such as Firefox do now come with the option of an inbuilt spell checker. It it great and I use it on one of my many machines. It underlines with a squiggle any errors. Within the Tools, Options, Advanced select the General tab and then make sure the box is ticked. If it is and you aren’t getting any warnings, right click on a text box and then look for either Languages or Add Dictionary. It could be that you have not yet installed a dictionary for you to check against. This is also how you can swap from the American English to the UK English dictionary.

Toolbar Spell Checking
If for whatever reason you don’t want to change browsers or just don’t like that spell checker, then grab yourself a copy of the Google Toolbar and install that. It also has a spell checker as part of it, but with this one you need to click the button at the end of the typing session and go through your mistakes correcting them.

The browser spell checker is, in my view, better as it tells you as you are typing and there is less chance of missing an error or even forgetting to go back to correct. However, if you are like me then there is no harm in using both. It is always nice to have Google tell you there are no spelling mistakes in the document!

Whichever alternative you decide to use it should only take you minutes to install and get using one of them, or both. They both highlight the errors and if you right click on the identified words a popup box shows you likely alternatives, making them both very quick and easy to use.

The only question really is do you want to check your spelling as you type, at the end or both?

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