I was the sort of child who always wanted to get things ‘right’. I found spelling quite easy, as words always looked like pictures to me, and I could usually tell instantly if the word was wrong by the way it looked. I was always useless at spelling words out loud. I found it a difficult to ‘read’ the word I could see clearly in my head. But I was proud of my written spelling, which always saw even the most unimaginative piece of writing getting a good mark from the teacher.
During my MPhil in Publishing Studies, I learned how to proof-read to a professional level. As it was still the 90s, I had to exercise my proof-reading skills on a lot of hard copy. I soon discovered that ‘good’ spellers aren’t necessarily the best proof-readers. On paper, too often I assumed I knew how to spell a word, which resulted in errors. Whereas a fellow student who freely admitted he was a dreadful speller got almost 100% accuracy on our exercises. He pointed out that because he wasn’t sure of his spelling, he checked almost everything. I was fast, but he was accurate. By the end of the course, he’d learned how to spell better, and I’d learned how to slow down and check.
Learning to proof-read changed the way I read. I became notoriously picky. I worked as a copy editor in several organisations. And I really enjoyed a stint as an electronic editor for an e-learning company where I explored my geeky nitpicking side by authoring a macro that automagically corrected the persistent repeat offences from our writing team before I began my human edit.
But spellcheckers have spoilt me. Spellcheckers have been around since the 1970s, and I can remember using them to check my documents since the 1980s. But since the introduction of spellcheckers for almost anywhere a human can enter text, my spelling has deteriorated.
Word spellchecks my documents. I have web browser spellcheckers for my blogs and webmails. Even the TextEdit on my macbook can check my spelling. Tweetdeck spellchecks my tweets. Now if I don’t know how to spell a word, I don’t even try. I type in an approximation, then right-click the mispelt word to get a list of possible corrections. My spelling has deteriorated noticeably. The few letters and notes I still write by hand are much more scrawly – in some cases deliberately so – to hide my possibly bad spelling.
This is a bad thing. But I don’t believe the parts of my brain that used to store the correct spelling for hundreds of thousands of words have rotted away with misuse. Thanks to my brain’s plasticity, I know those brain cells have been reused for something more urgent and useful. Just wish I knew what…
Tags: blog, cell, electron, geek, Learning, organisations, type, web, XP
