/ 27 July 2006

Red-faced spellcheck firm corrects own spelling

A company that sells software to correct irritating internet spelling mistakes has reissued its latest news release to correct a minor snafu.

TextTrust, which says it focuses on ”eliminating the negative text impressions on websites”, re-released a Tuesday news release to correct a mistake that listed the most common spelling errors on ”the 16-million we (sic) pages it has spell checked over the past year”.

It said commonly misspelled words included independent, accommodation and definitely, which were spelled independant, accomodation and definately.

”It’s very embarrassing,” said Pat Brink, public relations consultant for the Toronto-based company. ”I made the mistake, not TextTrust — they do a much better job, It’s certainly egg on the face of this public relations person.”

The release quoted TextTrust as saying that it used both human editors and special spell-checking software to scour websites for spelling mistakes.

”TextTrust wants to make sure that organisations never again receive the ‘I found a spelling error on your website’ e-mail,” it said. – Reuters