When Spelling Takes You Out at the Knees - A Cautionary Tale

Checking your spelling is NOT as easy as you think. In the process of elevating one's word choice you start to wade into murkier spelling waters. The only way to check it is not via spellcheck - they often give crazy advice when faced with unusual words. No, I suggest you add this app to your world: Linguee | Deutsch-Englisch Wörterbuch (und weitere Sprachen). Here they place all words in the context of books and articles in which they have been previously used. As their title suggests they do more than just English and German - they are worldwide language savvy! With Linguee you get more than a translation- you get the full context of the words.

This cautionary tale comes from my own prior mistakes. I had aimed in my Personal Statement to write a fantastic sentence about feeling compelled to get off the couch and do something big in this world. Make a difference! Find my voice! It was a very impassioned sentence....until it held in the punchline a TYPO! A typo I didn't catch because back then I did not read my work aloud or have the benefit of Linguee. Had I simply used one of the two methods I mentioned above I might have seen it. Let me break it down:

I wanted to write she possesses (e.g. she owns, she has...). Instead I wrote: she posses. That doesn't even make sense in English! As soon as I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. I had left out 'ses' - not a letter, but three letters that would have also made an entirely different sound if read aloud. My brain was imploding. How could I have been so careless! This was the clutch sentence of my Personal Statement. I had been published in a peer reviewed journal out of London earlier that year, but I made a mistake that could have wiped out my chances at getting into a top-tier university with three missed letters.

From that moment onwards I vowed to never send out anything I did not read aloud. I write every day in English and German and the keyboard on my phone and iPad often randomly switch on me. I can easily become the typo queen and be forced to send edited text after edited text with a lot of apologies. Embarrassing between friends and colleagues, but not as bad as a misspelling on the most important marketing tool of your intelligence and ambition to a university!

In the end, I got lucky, and the Admissions Committee representatives reading my application must have read it how I intended it, or let it slide. But back then applications were sent out in paper format, so a quick spellcheck would not have been possible. These days every mistake is magnified digitally. Let no one else head down this road!

P.S. Especially when writing in another language ask a native speaker to take a look. Only 5 minutes is what you need for a native speaker to find and fix countless mistakes you likely never saw.