To spell check a blog article, copy its text from your blog editor or from the published page, paste it into the Spell Checker, choose the language, and press Check spelling. Then correct each marked word in your post, and publish or update it.
A blog article is read by strangers, and readers on the internet are quick to point out a mistake. Good content matters most, but a typo in the headline or in the first paragraph can make readers doubt the rest. So check every article, ideally before it goes live. If it is already published, it is not too late: you can check the live text the same way.
The short version in 6 steps
- Copy the text of the article.
- Open the Spell Checker and paste the text into the text box.
- Choose the language and its variant.
- Turn on Picky mode if you also want style suggestions.
- Press Check spelling and go through the marked issues.
- Correct the mistakes in your blog editor, and publish or update the post.
The Spell Checker is free to use and needs no account. Here is each step in more detail.
Step 1: copy only the article
In your blog editor, select the text of the post and copy it. If the article is already live, open it in your browser and select it there, from the headline to the last sentence.
Copy the article and nothing else. A blog page also has a menu, a sidebar, an author box, and perhaps comments. Those parts are not your article, and every extra line only gives you more marks to go through. Do include the headline and the subheadings, though: they are the most-read lines of a post, and a typo there is the one most readers see.
Step 2: paste the text into the text box
Open the Spell Checker. The page opens on a text box: paste your article there. Typed or pasted text can be up to 150,000 characters long, far more than even a very long blog post.
If you write your posts in a file, you can open the document instead of pasting. The Spell Checker reads Word documents (DOCX and DOC), OpenDocument (ODT), RTF, PDF, TXT, HTML, and Markdown, among other formats. The file can come from your computer, from a link (choose Paste URL), or from cloud storage.
Step 3: choose the language and its variant
Pick the language of the article and its variant, for example American or British English. You can also let the app detect the language, but detected English is checked as American English. If your blog is written in British English, choose it yourself, or words such as colour and organise are checked against the wrong variant. British or American English? explains how to keep one variant across all your posts.
Step 4: decide on Picky mode
Picky mode adds style suggestions to the check: wordy phrases, words you repeat, and wording that could be simpler. These are suggestions, not mistakes. For a blog article they are worth a look, because online readers skim, and a short, simple sentence is easier to skim.
Step 5: check and review
Press Check spelling. Each issue is underlined in the text and listed beside it, sorted by kind: Spelling, Grammar, Punctuation, and, in Picky mode, Style. Each kind is also a filter, so you can deal with all the spelling first and look at style last.
Click an underline or a card to see the explanation and the suggested fix. Pick the fix to apply it, or ignore the suggestion if it is wrong for your text.
Step 6: correct the post and update it
Now bring the corrections back to your blog. For a short post with little formatting, press Copy text and paste the corrected text into your editor. For a post with links, pictures, and bold text, it is usually safer to keep the result open beside your blog editor and correct each word there, so the formatting stays as it is.
Then publish the post or, if it was already live, update it. To check the next article, press Check another text.
Names, brands, and blog jargon
Blog articles are full of words that no dictionary knows: the names of people and products, the name of your blog, technical terms, and the new words of your field. The Spell Checker may mark them as mistakes. Ignore such a suggestion, or choose Add to dictionary so the word is not flagged again. The word is kept in this browser only. How to train your spell checker explains how to cut down these false alarms.
When to use the AI Spell Checker
When you write fast, you often type a real word in the wrong place: form for from, or there for their. Rules find these hard to spot, because each word on its own is spelled correctly. The AI Spell Checker has an AI model read whole sentences, so it also catches those, and clumsy wording too. It costs more to run, so its free use is limited: keep it for the articles that matter most. You use it the same way as the Spell Checker.
A final read before you publish
A spell check cannot tell whether a link goes to the right page, a name is spelled the way its owner spells it, or a number is right. Preview the post once more before you publish it, and read the headline, the first paragraph, and the links with extra care. The proofreading checklist lists what else to look at.