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A lot of the time I don't proofread because...I just don't and I want to get my chapter up on fanfiction right away. But spell checkers don't catch a lot of the common mistakes I make like if I want to type "he" and I type "her" instead.

I think Gaia should have its own spell checker for all those n00bs. D:

The trouble with spell checkers is how people use them. So many people turn on the grammar and spell check on MS Word and call that perfect if there are not any squiggly lines. The thing is, spell checkers can be wrong almost as often as they are right, especially if one has a good vocabulary.

The truth is, a program can only be trained to do so much. People know so much more.

Personally I like the old Word Perfect spellchecker. It underlines incorrect words as you write them, and then the spellchecker goes through the document with you, word by underlined word, and you can choose to replace the word with a word on the suggestions list of words that you probably meant when you typed it, or you can ignore it, ignore all the words spelled that way, (which is helpful in an essay on say, Czeckoslavakian dictators) add it to the dictionary, or fix it yourself. Plus it automatically fixes words that are completely obvious. (like 'teh' to 'the') It actually discourages laziness.

I had a habit of typing 'teh' instead of 'the', and in my dictionary 'teh' was a word, so it never caught it. In Word Perfect, you can also subtract words from your dictionary, which really helped in my case.

I use a spell checker quite often because my own spelling is atrocious, however I agree that it’s no substitute for proofreading. Because of the style of writing I do, the words I use often aren’t recognized by the computer’s dictionary. As a general rule, if it’s a real word, such as the proper name for a style of weapon, like the falchion, I’ll add it. If it’s a character’s name, which probably wont show up again in my writing, then I don’t and just ignore it.

Wow, I do enjoy having certain words corrected for me. But as soon as I started typing certain names and such spell check just got tiresome. And when I'm really going on a writing spree, I know full well I better proof and get someone else to re-proof before submitting it. I've been humiliated by word before. evil

I only use the spell check in my WordPerfect program for words that I'm unsure of (which isn't often, anyway).
Personally, I think I'm too lazy to use spell check. I'd rather go to my handy pocket dictionary. xD