Practice Ledes: Spell Check Is Not Perfect

While spell check is an important tool you should use each and every time you write, it is not a perfect tool. For example, it won't catch a word that you misspell that creates a new word that is correctly spelled. Like here:

Thanks to a prompt police force, a terrified mother was reunited with her six-month-old daughter 40 minutes after a convenience store robber speed away with her car, with the baby inside.

You meant sped, right? But what you wrote was speed. And spell check wasn't going to catch it because speed was correctly spelled, if not intended.

Spell check is a complement to -- but not a substitute for -- checking your story line-by-line with your own eyeballs, and even reading things aloud to see if there's some sort of easy-to-make but hard-to-spot goof like this one, that would be immediately apparent when spoken out loud.