Thursday, June 2, 2011

Does Spellcheck Make us Poor Spellers?

For some reason, spelling has always come fairly easy to me. When I was a kid in school, I noticed that there were kids who really, really struggled with spelling. It also seemed to me that the kids who were very poor spellers seemed to do much better in math, whereas I was horrible in math.

I saw a link there and I can see it now as an adult, but there is something that really makes me wonder about this.

I can't have a computer do math for me, like spellcheck can make you a better speller. Sure there are calculators, and quick books to make it easier, but it will never replace doing math, like spellcheck does for proofreading.

If I look at facebook posts, I am amazed at what a generation of absolutely CRAP spellers we are. In fact, I have friends who are English as a second language that spell better than my North American friends. -It's really embarrassing!!

What really astonishes me, is that nobody has seemed to grasp the concept of You're/Your, There/Their/They're, Alot vs A lot, and this is just the basic stuff.

So my question is, are we just a generation of poor spellers, or has spellcheck made us worse because we just expect it to pick up all of our mistakes?

Certainly, I would think that none of the people who are poor spellers really care about being better spellers, otherwise you would see them at least spell check what they write before they post it. It evident when people don't do this.

So do you think that we just don't care, or that we have actually declined because of spellcheck?

1 comment:

  1. I truely don't know what your talking about, Chuck;)

    ...Except I think you may have forgotten a few: too/to/two and the notorious then/than mix up. I've seen third grade teachers get this habitually wrong as of late. Such a shame.

    Thank you, Sister Shirley, for putting an 'A' on one side of the board and 'lot' on the other:)

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.