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Is anyone else in a similar situation? I grew up with Google and spellcheckers, so there wasn't much reason for me to learn how to spell many words precisely. V

Is anyone else in a similar situation? I grew up with Google and spellcheckers, so there wasn't much reason for me to learn how to spell many words precisely. Vocabulary yes, spelling, not so much. I find myself spelling most words correctly, but there are some that I just let the spellchecker handle. I used to feel embarrassed about this, since the old pros never had the benefit of spellcheckers, and would probably eschew them anyway. But from a writer's standpoint, is it worth feeling embarrassed about, or is it a case of technology enabling us to focus on more important things?

amorphid 9y ago
In most cases, being a poor speller isn't a big deal. That's what proofreading is for. It doesn't matter how you get to the correct spelling, as long as you do. You are human, and if you fight your nature instead of working with it, you're going to,have a bad time.
3minus1 9y ago
I think spelling is like typing where you gradually improve. Even with a spellchecker you still get a lot of practice typing words and seeing when they are wrong.
Jach 9y ago
I used to be a great speller and pseudo grammar nazi, didn't really use the computer all that much until ~12 (and that's around when I was forced to learn touch typing), but IM, red-squiggle-underlined misspells and programmerisms like arbitrary prefix/suffix application or excessive hyphenation and parentheticals helped a lot to ruin it. But I'd wager I'd still fair better than average in a spelling bee... I'm not sure what percentage of words I mistype these days are due to laziness of not wanting to type the whole thing out (I've made some embarrassingly(?) sloppy google searches knowing that it would autocorrect to the right thing) or actual issues of misspelling (like missing the second 'r' just now in 'embarrassingly'). And of those actual issues like that, are they just from typing too fast and being too far ahead after noticing the squiggle to break my flow of thought and go back and correct right away or did I genuinely forgot how to spell the word and would fail it at a pop-spelling-bee? Maybe when I type a word I use an heuristic to tell my fingers how to proceed and get on to the next word, and that heuristic has certain pitfalls that might go away with focused drilling, whereas if I went slow (like doing it by hand) I'd get it right more often because I'm considering the individual characters. So now the question is just whether the fault was in the heuristic or the actual knowledge. I know sometimes it's the latter and sometimes I'll have to google what I think it is to get the correction (because my system spellcheck failed me I was off so much) but how often? In the end I generally don't worry about it. I'll make an effort in certain situations, but even then my first draft might just leave a bunch of things uncorrected until I pass over it the second time where I fix mistakes, reword, etc. Accuracy, clarity, and concision all take extra time, and not having to immediately worry about spelling and being able to rely on computer tools to fix a lot of issues automatically is pretty convenient time-wise. I'm also grateful I can type fast because that means if I have a fixed amount of time to write something I can probably finish and do at least one revision in the same amount of time slower typists use to get through their first draft. I had a Latin/English teacher who used to think poorly of published books with bad typos and other errors in them until she wrote a book and saw just how many things she missed, and the initial proofread from the editor missed, and even after some back-and-forth there still might be something wrong. Perfection is hard even with computer assistance, no need to feel embarrassed. So yeah, I'd just focus on more important things, like making something good that is clearly communicated. If readers understand, what's the problem? (Beefor thuh refformashion, u ceud stil interprit this... But I draw the line at using emojis in place of words...) Another analogy would be some engineers seem to decline in their ability to do simple arithmetic as they increase in their ability to do advanced symbolic mathematics. I frequently come back to the first half of http://www.theodoregray.com/BrainRot/ http://www.theodoregray.com/BrainRot/ and especially this excerpt: "To think that a modern human should be able to do everything that previous generations have been able to do, and also have any time left over to learn anything new, is basically insulting to all those previous generations, since it implies that they under-employed their intelligence."

amorphid 9y ago

In most cases, being a poor speller isn't a big deal. That's what proofreading is for. It doesn't matter how you get to the correct spelling, as long as you do. You are human, and if you fight your nature instead of working with it, you're going to,have a bad time.

3minus1 9y ago

I think spelling is like typing where you gradually improve. Even with a spellchecker you still get a lot of practice typing words and seeing when they are wrong.

Jach 9y ago

I used to be a great speller and pseudo grammar nazi, didn't really use the computer all that much until ~12 (and that's around when I was forced to learn touch typing), but IM, red-squiggle-underlined misspells and programmerisms like arbitrary prefix/suffix application or excessive hyphenation and parentheticals helped a lot to ruin it. But I'd wager I'd still fair better than average in a spelling bee... I'm not sure what percentage of words I mistype these days are due to laziness of not wanting to type the whole thing out (I've made some embarrassingly(?) sloppy google searches knowing that it would autocorrect to the right thing) or actual issues of misspelling (like missing the second 'r' just now in 'embarrassingly'). And of those actual issues like that, are they just from typing too fast and being too far ahead after noticing the squiggle to break my flow of thought and go back and correct right away or did I genuinely forgot how to spell the word and would fail it at a pop-spelling-bee? Maybe when I type a word I use an heuristic to tell my fingers how to proceed and get on to the next word, and that heuristic has certain pitfalls that might go away with focused drilling, whereas if I went slow (like doing it by hand) I'd get it right more often because I'm considering the individual characters. So now the question is just whether the fault was in the heuristic or the actual knowledge. I know sometimes it's the latter and sometimes I'll have to google what I think it is to get the correction (because my system spellcheck failed me I was off so much) but how often? In the end I generally don't worry about it. I'll make an effort in certain situations, but even then my first draft might just leave a bunch of things uncorrected until I pass over it the second time where I fix mistakes, reword, etc. Accuracy, clarity, and concision all take extra time, and not having to immediately worry about spelling and being able to rely on computer tools to fix a lot of issues automatically is pretty convenient time-wise. I'm also grateful I can type fast because that means if I have a fixed amount of time to write something I can probably finish and do at least one revision in the same amount of time slower typists use to get through their first draft. I had a Latin/English teacher who used to think poorly of published books with bad typos and other errors in them until she wrote a book and saw just how many things she missed, and the initial proofread from the editor missed, and even after some back-and-forth there still might be something wrong. Perfection is hard even with computer assistance, no need to feel embarrassed. So yeah, I'd just focus on more important things, like making something good that is clearly communicated. If readers understand, what's the problem? (Beefor thuh refformashion, u ceud stil interprit this... But I draw the line at using emojis in place of words...) Another analogy would be some engineers seem to decline in their ability to do simple arithmetic as they increase in their ability to do advanced symbolic mathematics. I frequently come back to the first half of http://www.theodoregray.com/BrainRot/ http://www.theodoregray.com/BrainRot/ and especially this excerpt: "To think that a modern human should be able to do everything that previous generations have been able to do, and also have any time left over to learn anything new, is basically insulting to all those previous generations, since it implies that they under-employed their intelligence."