Is spell-checking making us lazy?

These days, I write for a liv­ing. Rather weird, con­sid­er­ing I work in ‘mar­ket­ing ana­lyt­ics’. But it’s true. “The word is might­ier than the dig­its”. And in my trade, com­mu­ni­cat­ing what our cus­tomers want into clear and artic­u­late doc­u­men­ta­tion is part and par­cel of what I do.

I also write for myself. Some time back, I was on hol­i­day. Walked into a book­shop, down at Bate­mans Bay. A title caught my eye. “Cre­ative Jour­nal writ­ing” was its’ name. Stephanie Dowrie its’ author. I grabbed it. Flicked its pages. Looked at the table of con­tents. Read a few pages. I was hooked.

Since then, I have been writ­ing my own jour­nal for a while. I guess that is why I had not posted back again in this blog for a while. I still write my jour­nal. Not every day; I did yes­ter­day though. And today I decided it was time for writ­ing more in my blog. Give back to my small but loyal read­er­ship. Get back into it.

As I was writ­ing in my jour­nal, Microsoft word cor­rected a num­ber of spell-check errors as I typed. A very use­ful fea­ture, but after a while, I realised one that comes at a price. I noticed some words I always mis-spell. Those pesky ones where a ‘double-m’ can and some­times does show are the most promi­nent exam­ples. And I almost always get it wrong. But MS Word does its effi­cient cor­rec­tion, and I am in the clear.

So why am I wor­ried? I guess because my pen does not have auto-correct on it. Nei­ther does face­book, the cus­tomer ser­vice web­site I used yes­ter­day, or my mobile phone’s email client. And I am pretty sure that I make plenty of mis­takes in those elec­tronic and nor­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tions I go through every day. MS Word has made me ‘spellcheck-lazy’. It’s not its’ fault. It’s not even mine. Call it a ‘sec­ondary effect’ of using “pro­duc­tiv­ity improve­ment” tools in our every­day life.

Then I started think­ing. If that’s how it is affect­ing me, how is it affect­ing oth­ers? I have over 20 years of accu­mu­lated expe­ri­ence (‘duoble c’s are another tricky one for me) in writ­ing with­out spell-check crutches. Oth­ers, like my chil­dren, have none of that. Will it make them not just spell-check lazy but spell-check illit­er­ate? Who knows. Only time will tell.

This reflec­tion reminded me of the end­less argu­ments we had with our alge­bra (and later on cal­cu­lus) teach­ers at high school. They argued we should not be allowed cal­cu­la­tors in tests. We argued that the test was about our knowl­edge of the the­o­rems and other math­e­mat­i­cal knowl­edge, not a test of our abil­ity to com­pute man­u­ally. But maybe they were right. Maybe they knew that maths lit­er­acy depends on some basics, and if you don’t know them well; don’t exer­cise them, you loose those abil­i­ties. You may be able to estab­lish how to cal­cu­late the first deriv­a­tive of a func­tion, but your maths will still be awful if your ‘core maths’ skills always rely on crutches. Or at least that is the old argument.

Not sure who is right. I guess I will get a bet­ter idea as my chil­dren grow older. But based on the fact that young peo­ple around us are start­ing to use SMS-speak in their nor­mal writ­ten life, we may have some strong evi­dence of the direc­tion things are taking.

Tagged as: Work Performance