As an editor, I am surprised at how often reporters send me articles that they obviously haven’t run through a spell checker beforehand. And it’s usually journalists who work in a language other than English who fail to spell check – even though they might need all the English spelling help they can get.

With so many free tools and dictionaries available online, there is really no excuse. A reporter’s job is all about getting the facts correct. And if you send off an article, script or even an email full of spelling mistakes to your editor, how can they trust you to get the other facts right?

onMedia offers some tips on how to change the spell checker to different languages in documents and emails and which online spell-checkers are the most reliable.

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Journalists (and experienced ones at that) often misspell people’s names. This doesn’t just make reporters look sloppy, it also raises doubts about the accuracy of the other information in the report. In the first of two posts about spelling, onMedia’s Kate Hairsine gives some tips on how journalists can spell people’s names right.

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