COLUMN: Yikes, I hope I didn't spell anything wrong!

One of the services I provide as editor of the Daily Inter Lake is sprucing up the grammar and spelling of letters submitted by our readers for publication on the opinion page.

But that does not mean I don’t need help myself on occasion.

Although I pride myself on being skilled in the orthographic arts (I had a perfect 100 in my third-grade class for spelling the entire year, never having missed a word on a quiz), nonetheless I am prone to make the occasional error, perhaps now more than ever since I turned 60.

There is nothing more disheartening than waking up in the middle of the night with the sudden realization that you sent the paper to bed with a 72-point typo on Page One. The mental gymnastics of the grieving process as you work your way from denial to acceptance of your own stupidity at three in the morning is something only a fellow editor could fully appreciate. We all make mistakes, but making it in front of 30,000 readers — and an eagle-eyed publisher! — is a fate reserved for those usually found in one of the more remote circles of Dante’s inferno. Oh the shame!

Fortunately, I do not have a specific egregious error to report this morning, but some kind of error is bound to happen every day when you are publishing the equivalent of a paperback book in the course of about 10 hours. While I don’t see all of those mistakes, I know that you — our faithful readers — do. On the worst of them, I hear from some of you, but whether you call or not, rest assured I feel bad about the mistakes even if I don’t ever hear about them.

We are constantly trying to improve our ability to prevent errors, but society’s declining interest in grammar and spelling is not making that any easier. Indeed, over the past 15 years since I became editor, there has been a steady decline in the quality of writing skills that I see in job applicants.

It’s not a new proposition that writers often value creativity more highly than the formal skills of spelling, punctuation and grammar. I suppose that’s why there has always been a high demand for editors such as myself, but nowadays it seems that the difference is that people who are really bad at spelling think they are really good.

The culprit, of course, is spell check and grammar check — and smartphones that really may be smarter than some of their owners! As a society, we’ve become so dependent on technology that self-reliance has dwindled down to merely having to remember to plug in the iPhone before we go to bed.

And this is not just the younger generation’s problem by any means. The 20-somethings who apply for work just out of college think they are great spellers — because they got A’s and B’s in university-level English. The problem is that their 40-something instructors don’t grade on spelling because that would require them to be able to recognize misspelled words themselves! And that’s in the English or journalism departments. You can imagine how much less incentive there is for students in other departments to take the time to make sure their pronouns match their antecedents.

The good news is that people can learn to improve — even after they have completed their formal education — and that’s been the case with most of the writers we hire. When asked to proofread each other’s copy, they learn what to look for and then avoid those same mistakes in their own work.

It’s also never too early to learn good writing habits, and parents should be encouraging their children to read and write at a young age. My 5-year-old and I enjoy challenging each other with Scrabble for Juniors and other word games, and he likes to stump me in Mandarin — which is not hard to do!

If you want to set a high bar for yourself, you might consider attending the Flathead County Spelling Bee this week. Local students in the fifth through eighth grades will be performing amazing feats of alphabetical derring-do. Bring a dictionary so you can keep up! The event will be held at Glacier High School at 1:30 p.m. Thursday in the Performing Arts Center.

Frank Miele is the managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana.