Spellchecks.
Written on April 7, 2011
An English Language teacher complained at a meeting that modern technologies cannot help her to teach better because it was hard to use, and really inconvenient.
“We don’t even have auto spellcheck in Moodle!” she quipped.
Back in the days when I was still in school, we took pride in being able to perform a quick search with the real dictionary — the process of searching a new word allowed me to stumble upon other words. In fact, my editors told us to turn off auto spellcheck when I was earning a living as a writer.
The keyboard has already taken away my motor skills with the pen, are we going to allow the word processors take away our ability to spell properly? Come to China and you will understand what I meant; roadsigns and huge signboards with bad spelling is part of life here. But I don’t blame them, really.
Technology is supposed to help us evolve, not devolve into some retards who couldn’t spell properly.
I have great sympathy for Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Thais who face English spelling. English spelling is irrational at best, plus there are often two acceptable speling depending on which side of the Atlantic ocean you happen to be on. I have sympathy with those who speak more than one latin language where spellings and words are similar down to a single letter. I am ever-grateful for spell-check. It is fast and if you add the saved time to reading, vocabulary can expand just as it did when we used those books called dictionaries. Why be artificially retro and deny the use of a convenient tool?