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12.18 Is using an automatic spell check enough?
No, it isn’t! The following titles contain spelling mistakes and typos (e.g. inverted
or missing letters) that spell checkers are not able to fi nd.

S1. *Incidence of Hearth Attacks and Alzeimer’s Disease among Women form East Asia
S2. *An atmospheric tape reorder: rainfall analysis trough sequence weighing

In S1 there are two errors that a spell checker cannot find – hearth and form ( heart
and from ). This is because these words exist and will be in the spell checker’s vocab-
ulary. Likewise in S2 reorder, trough and weighing ( recorder, through and weight-
ing ) are words that exist.

A spell checker would certainly highlight Alzeimer’s (S1) as not being correct, but
many authors ignore technical words that are highlighted by mistakenly thinking
that they are simply not in the spell checker’s vocabulary. Often this is the case, but
not here. The correct spelling is Alzheimer’s .

The problem in this case is that you as the author may be incredibly familiar with
the title of your paper, it may even have been the title of your Masters or PhD thesis.
This means that you are unlikely to check for possible errors. Given that you may
be unable to see your own spelling mistakes, it is a good idea to show your title to
several other people, fi rstly to get them to check the spelling but more importantly
to get some feedback on whether your title is clear and explicit enough.

In a research paper, poor spelling gives the idea that you did not make the effort to
check your paper. By extension, if you did not check your spelling there is a chance
you did not check your data. Perhaps for this reason referees seem obsessed with
finding and reporting spelling mistakes. If they find more than one or two this may

cause them to recommend that publication of your paper should be delayed until the
paper has been thoroughly proof read.
Another major reason for checking the spelling in your title, is that if a key word
(e.g. Alzheimer’s) is misspelled or not punctuated correctly (note the apostrophe
before the s ), then search engines will not be able to fi nd it.