Now that I’m waaay past my college era and pretty sure I’m not interested in going back for any more/other degrees … I keep coming up with great ideas for large research papers or a thesis or something. My latest idea for a great topic is all about the impact spellcheck has had on people’s ability to spell.
For example, does spellcheck (especially instant spellcheck) make you a better or worse speller? People I’ve talked to about this are undecided. Some think it makes you better, since you can instantly see when you type something wrong and learn the correct way. Others think it makes you worse because you become dependent on it. I’m not sure it makes me worse, but I’m pretty sure its not making me better either.
In fact, once I came up with this idea, I started to be a bit more aware of my spelling and how often my computer told me I was spelling something wrong. I quickly realized that I was frequently typing the same words wrong over and over again. Apparently, I can’t spell:
- Appropriate (apropriate)
- Functionalities (functionalites)
- Commitment (committment)
- Tomorrow (tommorrow)
- Stored (storred)
- Transferring (transfering)
- Tactical (tacticle)
- Impaired (impared)
- Received (recieved)
- Misspelled (mispelled)
(Kinda makes you wonder why I use THOSE words so frequently, doesn’t it?!)
So … based on my own little study, it looks like spellcheck isn’t making me a worse speller, but its not really helping things either, other than to give me the ability to correct it before I hit save.
Here’s why I’m posting it on my blog: I realized that my IMs (Sametime inside Notes on a Mac) didn’t have spellcheck and I was probably spelling all of these words wrong all the time. So I decided to sign on to IM in Windows (using Parallels) so I could use the new Sametime 7.5 client (which has spellcheck built in). My spelling instantly improved (well, at least to those that received my messages since it corrected it by the time I hit “send.”
Here’s a screen shot of what I’m talking about. Notice that “Sametime” is misspelled. 
What people here are saying…