Spanish proofreading for the monolingual set: Yes, those diacritical marks really do matter

That’s no squiggle.

Diacritical marks are one of the biggest problems I see in Spanish pieces I am working on. Spanish uses diacritical marks to distinguish meaning and pronunciation, so when they are used incorrectly or not at all, whole sentences can be rendered nonsensical, unclear, or even downright offensive (more on that later). Screwing up one of these marks may seem like a trivial mistake because they’re so small, but in languages such as Spanish that make use of diacritical marks, it’s no different from any other typo.