My dad would be the first to admit he wasn’t great at spelling. You’d never know it to read anything he ever wrote. At home, we had a Webster’s dictionary and a full set of the Encyclopædia Britannica. But that wasn’t good enough—my dad carried a pocket dictionary with him wherever he went. If he had any doubt about a word’s spelling or meaning, he looked it up. He sat at his desk or at our dining room table, writing in long hand with an open dictionary beside him. It was tedious, and it meant everything was more difficult and took longer for him than it did for someone else. The fact that it mattered so much to him made an impression on me. He took pride in his work, and it made me proud of him.
Growing up, if my siblings and I didn’t know how to spell a word or didn’t know a word’s meaning, my dad insisted we look it up in the dictionary. It’s a tradition I carried on with my own children and now my grandchildren. When you have to make an effort to do the learning, it sticks.
Today, we have the luxury of spellchecking programs and all sorts of other writing tools. I suggest you familiarize yourself with them and make use of the ones that work for you. But I also suggest you don’t rely on them to the exclusion of your own judgment. It’s easy to become complacent these days and to think it doesn’t matter–we have computers to check our spelling and grammar and punctuation for us. But computers aren’t always accurate, and nothing beats the empowered feeling of finding the answers yourself. So buy a dictionary or subscribe to Merriam-Webster online. Become a student of words, and make sure the words in your manuscript are spelled and used correctly. If spelling or vocabulary don’t come easily, you can make a game or a project of it. Buy a word-a-day calendar or subscribe to Merriam-Webster Word of the Day. Pick up a cheap, old dictionary from a thrift shop and learn a new word every day. Consider brushing up on grammar and punctuation too. Dreyer’s English is a great place to start, also available in a day-to-day calendar and a game called Stet!
Why should I worry about it? you may ask. I’m a writer, an artist, a creative person. My editor will fix all that.
Yes, you are a creative person, and you shouldn’t worry about such things while you’re writing and rewriting and revising your first drafts. Your focus at that point should be on telling your story. Don’t let worries about spelling, grammar, and punctuation, or worries about any little details, distract you.
And yes, your editor will fix all that if need be. Any serious writer is going to work with one or more editors through the process of developmental edits, line edits, and copyedits. This especially holds true if you are a self-publishing author or don’t have an agent or publisher to vet your work. Your editorial team will help you get your manuscript in the best shape possible for your desired goal, whether that’s publication or querying agents, and that includes catching and correcting errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar.
So take comfort in the fact your editor will have your back in the end. But take control of your own destiny too. After you’ve finished with your manuscript, and before you send it off, run spellcheck and make an editorial pass of your own. Read your manuscript out loud, word by word, to catch errors. Or have MS Word’s “Read Aloud” feature read it to you. Presenting your editor with a manuscript that’s in the best possible shape will often save you money on editing costs. Plus, the more work you put into your manuscript, the better each subsequent revision will be. How can this help but result in a better book in the end, whether you’re self-publishing your book or sending the manuscript to an agent or a traditional or hybrid publisher? You don’t want your readers distracted by mistakes—you want them caught up in your story, and errors in spelling, grammar, or punctuation are a surefire way to pull them out of it.