Well, not for our spellcheckers but, even worse, our children’s spellcheckers. It was inevitable, of course. The new Luddites will take aim at anything that makes our lives easier and wasn’t used down on the farm 150 years ago.
Meghan Moravcik Walbert over at Life Hacker is urging us to turn off our children’s spellcheckers. The reason she gives for this advice is the usual psychobabble about not stunting the kids’ writing by forcing them to concentrate on the mechanical aspects such as spelling. In other words, in writing intelligibly.
I’m coming to you not as some spelling prodigy who never suffered from the schizophrenic spelling rules and exceptions that is English but as a terrible speller who even in adulthood had to suffer the indignity of having his children correct his spelling. But my spelling has improved in the last few years and I bet you can guess why.
Yes, of course: spellcheckers. I’ve found that having immediate feedback when I misspelled a word helped me to learn the correct spelling and not make the same mistake next time. And it’s not just me. The very first comment by Litt, who appears to be an even worse speller than me, echoes the same sentiment.
Another comment opines that “Our kids wouldn’t learn from using spell check, they 100% would rely on it — just like they would if we fed them the answer every single time.” That’s just flat out wrong and, really, an insult to our children. They’re not trained puppies with a limited intellect capable of learning only a few tricks. They are in fact at the age where they are the most open to learning. You can allow them to continually misspell words so as not to bruise their egos or whatever the new Luddites are worried about but why let the bad habit set? Provide instantaneous feedback so that they can learn the correct spelling with as little effort as possible.