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Technical writing: Spelling

Spell checkers are extremely helpful but not infallible, especially with typing errors. Consider the words now and not in the following two sentences:

  • The results are now presented in detail.
  • The results are not presented in detail.

These two sentences have very different meanings and a spell checker would not find anything wrong with either of them.

Some frequently misspelt words are listed below:

accessible liaison   personnel recommend
benefited necessary     possession relevant
gauge   occasion       receive sincerely


There are also words with similar spellings but different meanings that are frequently confused. For example:

compliment and complement principal and principle
lose and loose stationary and stationery
personnel and personal where and were


And words that sound the same but have different meanings such as:

band and banned their and there
for and four to, too and two
sight, site and cite whether, weather and wether (a castrated ram!).


A sensible idea is to have a dictionary nearby. It is best not to use your auto correct function as unrecognised technical words and proper names may be altered to words that are known to your word processor.

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PILOT - Technical writing by Marion Kelt, GCU, Vince Ricci, CIEE, Joe SChall, PennState University and Glynis Perkin, Loughborough University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://www.slideshare.net/tokyovince/introduction-to-technical-writing-4305074 http://www.slideshare.net/engCETL/technical-report-writing-handout https://www.e-education.psu.edu/styleforstudents/c1_p15.html .