I am a poor speller. There are some words I will never be able to spell with confidence. I missed the word restaurant on a spelling test in the third grade. I always spell it restuarant. Permanent is another one I missed on Mrs. Craig’s spelling test. I always get them wrong. But I know I will spell them wrong and double check them.
I could usually tell if a word was misspelled and would look up the correct spelling in a dictionary. Then came computers and the magic of spellcheck. I no longer needed to look up words, they were underlined and a choice of words was given to you. I was in heaven.
It got even better, auto correct. The computer/phone filled in the word as you started typing. You didn’t even need to finish the word. Pure magic for poor spellers.
Then it all went wrong. Even when you misspelled a word, if it was a real word it was left. For/four, ill/I’ll, hop/hope, there/they’re/their, I had to start carefully proofing everything I wrote.
I wrote a blog a year or so ago about a business trip in the desserts or was it desert? Yes I wrote desserts instead of desert. Marty caught it when he read the blog, the next day. Embarrassing.
Marty can spell anything. But auto correct even gets him. He wrote on Facebook that he had replaced a worn out flag. Except auto correct put he had relaxed the flag.
There are lots of sites that post silly, obscene, stupid auto correct texts. Just Google auto correct.
Even with problems, I still love spell check. It is a wonderful invention.
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