After the Deadline

One advantage of working with WordPress.com is I have access to how you use After the Deadline and what you’re doing with it.  The “Ignore Always” preferences are stored in our databases.  I decided to see what I could learn by querying this information.

Here are the top ignored phrases:

1. alot
2. Kanye
3. lol
4. texting
5. everytime
6. Beyonce
7. cafe
8. youtube
9. haha
10. dough
11. facebook
12. f***
13. Steelers
14. chemo

It’s kind of funny because this tells me something about what you’re writing about.  Here are my responses to these.

2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 13, and 14 are legitimate things you’re writing about and belong in the AtD dictionary.  I added them to the master wordlists yesterday.

1 and 5 are errors but you like them, I’ll keep flagging them. 🙂  I do realize AtD needs to do a better job suggesting split words in the spelling corrections.  It’s a day project and I already know how I plan to do this.  Expect this soon.

8 and 11 are proper nouns and the correct capitalization exists inside of AtD.  In fact AtD probably suggests the correct capitalization when marking these words as wrong.  For example, at Automattic we consider WordPress the only proper spelling of WordPress.  AtD honors this.  Still, despite this, I noticed some folks have chosen to select ignore so WordPress does not come up as a misspelled word.

7 is in the AtD dictionary but with the accented character.  I wonder if a plugin exists to automatically insert accents in words where they belong.  Using AtD’s contextual model I could probably do this in a non-intrusive way with a high degree of accuracy.  Any interest?  In the meantime, I’m going to add words like 7 without the accent to the AtD lexicon.

12 is in the dictionary and isn’t checked by the misused word detector.  I hypothesize that several writers feared their self-expression would be hindered and added it manually from their user settings page.

The word dough (10) is in the dictionary.  My guess is the misused word detection loves to flag the word dough as incorrect despite the best intentions of our baking bloggers.  This is precisely the kind of insight I wanted to gain from this little experiment.