Squiggles Should Induce Squirming

Spellcheck squiggles are your friend.  If the spellchecker says you have a potential issue, check it out.  It's nice when the spellchecker will catch plagarism for you so you can change it to plagiarism.

But what if you type the name of an author in your works cited list and the spellcheck does not recognize the name?  An example would be Mihaly Csikszenthmihalyi, the famous psychologist who promotes the idea of flow.  The spellchecker is most likely going to squiggle that.  So what should you do?  Here are the steps:

1. Double check to make sure you spelled the name correctly (this is important).
2. If you are sure you are right, right click and choose "ignore"--or "add to dictionary"--if that's an option.

The idea here is to not leave squiggles on your document, especially if it's going to be submitted electronically so that your teacher/reader doesn't think,  "Oh!  Look at that messy paper."  Now, let me tell you that I think sometimes you may remove the squiggles, but they will reappear when someone else opens the document.  Be that as it may, but at least make your document clean.

Does all this really matter?  Maybe, maybe not.  But you won't do wrong by being more careful than less careful in this case.