To send an email full of typos and misspellings is the height of embarrassment. As we deal with people on a face-to-face basis less often, the more important becomes our written communications. What would a potential client say if she received an email from someone she didn’t know and it appeared written by an elementary school student? It doesn’t actually reflect the intelligence of the sender, but the receiver might not be thinking that way. That’s why when someone dispenses business advice, they almost invariably mention proofreading emails as an essential. It becomes even more important on your BlackBerry. 
There are just so many places you can make an error on your Berry. Some people can be super-accurate with their thumbs. Others will struggle. Thankfully, your BlackBerry has a number of spell checking options. Just go to the messages application, hit menu, scroll to Options, and select Spell Checking. You’ll see a screen similar to the one on your right. The two most important options are the final two. If you send emails to mostly business contacts I’d recommend checking the Spell Check Email Before Sending option. That will run through your email for any words not in the dictionary. You can add words to the dictionary by clicking the Custom Dictionary link at the bottom of the Spell Check page. This is nice if, like me, you have an unrecognized last name. The other option, the one I prefer, is to spell check as you type. Some people don’t like this, as it can cause delays in your typing. This won’t auto-correct the errors, but will notify you of them with a gray underline. To the first option, Ignore Case, I’d uncheck that if you’re sending mostly to business contacts. People tend to be understanding about case from BlackBerry emails, but it’s best to make your email look as nice as possible. It takes just a few seconds, and it will create a much better impression for the recipient. Bonus tip: Use AutoText to make automatic corrections to words you often misspell. “Teh” to “the” is my favorite.
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Thank you so much for this. I’m an English Professor, so it is very important that my spelling and grammar are correct. The problem is that I have industry specific terms that my Blackberry kept auto correcting. It was very frustrating. Your article showed me where to go to set up my custom dictionary.