Spelling mistakes used to bother me a lot and get under my skin, but now I just try to see the humor in it and remind students to re-read their papers slowly. Here is my stock advice that is programmed by a macro to populate a Word comment bubble:
Please spellcheck your essay before submitting it. Try to read through your document slowly by using your finger or the eraser-side of a pencil to slow down your reading. This will help you read more slowly and catch mistakes.
Below is an old cartoon I made a couple years ago based on a typo I found in set of chess instructions: "The prawn [sic] moves straight ahead, never backwards." I was so tickled by the image of the shrimp's cousin scuttling across a chess board that I simply had to draw it. I tried to capture a look of defiance on the prawn's face, as if to say, "No, I'm not moving back. Haven't you read the rules?"
Still, I'm thankful for inadvertently funny spelling errors. Without them, grading would be made a little less funny (very easy to do that), and I would never think thoughts like this:
Please spellcheck your essay before submitting it. Try to read through your document slowly by using your finger or the eraser-side of a pencil to slow down your reading. This will help you read more slowly and catch mistakes.
Below is an old cartoon I made a couple years ago based on a typo I found in set of chess instructions: "The prawn [sic] moves straight ahead, never backwards." I was so tickled by the image of the shrimp's cousin scuttling across a chess board that I simply had to draw it. I tried to capture a look of defiance on the prawn's face, as if to say, "No, I'm not moving back. Haven't you read the rules?"
Still, I'm thankful for inadvertently funny spelling errors. Without them, grading would be made a little less funny (very easy to do that), and I would never think thoughts like this:
"The prawn [sic] moves straight ahead, never backwards."
Bonus: A story about my first encounter with a prawn!
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