As an editor, do you ever think of yourself as a tiny soldier, thrust down amid a battlefield of words, charged with taming typos and curing comma splices? Or perhaps you imagine yourself an antibiotic, swimming around a body of work, searching for the diseased bits to engage in glorious medicinal battle?

Really, you don’t? Don’t tell me it’s just me. (Hey, imagining fantastic scenarios can at least make a rather tedious job more fun. The next time you’re triple checking that TPS report, try imagining that your cursor is a paratrooper. Trust me.)

Not to beat the analogy to death or anything, but if you, editor, are a soldier, then automated Spell Check is your preliminary bombing round. …I’m dropping the analogy. It’s getting far too violent for my peace loving heart. What I mean to say is that while Spell Check is by no means the be all and the end all when it comes to editing, it’s a ferocious first line of attack. And that’s not just because it picks up some of a document’s more obvious typos and syntax sins.

Automated Spell Check is the bee’s knees because it allows you a quick preliminary overview of issues with the document author’s writing style. Is Spell Check coming back with beaucoup sentence fragments? Now you know to look for them in the overall document. Has Spell Check informed you that a certain word is used incorrectly again and again throughout the document? (“Effect,” “numerous,” “amount” and “less” are all confusing words that spring to mind.) Good! Automated Spell Check has provided you with some recon on what to expect once you dig into the trenches… er, document. Now you know that the author has a little problem with misplaced modifiers, you are prepared to keep a sharp eye out for them.

So, soldiers (or, if you prefer, antibiotics), don’t disdain Spell Check just because it’s clunky and automated. Let it venture onto the field of battle ahead of you and gather some intel.