I’m pretty sleep deprived this week thanks to my ADORABLE BABIES WHO I ASSURE YOU CAN DO NO WRONG, and so my wife recommended keeping this week’s Tech Pubs Tuesday short and sweet. “How about something like, ‘Use spellcheck,'” she joked.

Ha! Little did she know that “Use Spellcheck” is actually on the list of possible topics I wrote out ahead of time. The joke is on her!

So. Use spellcheck!

Spellcheck is one of your best friends when you’re writing technical documentation. More accurately, spellcheck is your only friend when writing technical documentation.

Certainly grammar check isn’t a very good friend. Grammar check is like that “friend” who keeps passing around links to Truther theories or inane inspirational messages, and man, you’re totally going to unfriend grammar check when you finally get around to pruning your friends list. But spellcheck! When you need to move furniture across town, spellcheck is right there with her truck. Good old spellcheck.

“But Evan,” I hear you say. “Spellcheck doesn’t have all the technical terminology that I need! ” To which I say, “Right-click, Add to Dictionary.”

“But Evan,” I hear you say. “I use vim to write documentation, not some sissy GUI text editor.” To which I say, “I use vim to write documentation too!” And vim has a spellchecker. In fact, the vim spellchecker is… kind of interestingly nerdy. So start using it.

Seriously! Use spellcheck. It’s like having a test suite for your documentation. Or it’s about as close as you’re going to get to testing your documentation this side of the year 2050.

Thank you for your attention. And God help me if there are any spelling errors in this one.