Slashdot Mirror
Is Typing Ruining Your Ability To Spell?
NSN A392-99-964-5927 writes "My handwriting abilities have deteriorated over the years. Putting a real pen to paper, I get frustrated over how to spell correctly, as I am so accustomed to using a keyboard and knowing where the letters are. Having spoken to a few friends, I've found that this has become apparent to them, too. I've noticed that my grammar is also affected; maybe this is because I spent too much time on IRC and lowered my standards. Hand-written words are now becoming obsolete. There is often no need to think about writing anymore, or about how something is spelled. Are other Slashdotters having the same problem? (I'm used to Telex machines, which should give you an indication of how old I am.)"
...using a spelling-correcting keyboard has made my typing skills deteriorate noticeably. It's especially noticeable when I'm trying to use vi.
My IM client (pidgin) underlines misspelled words in red, as does firefox, so I've found that my spelling has actually been getting better. I tend to actually learn the correct spelling over time.
My handwriting has gone to crap, but what does that have to do with spelling? If anything, I would think that spelling would be more likely to improve, thanks to the slower pace of writing by hand. I pay more attention to what I am writing when I have to take the time to write it out by hand.
If the quality of your writing is going down, I suspect that has to do with the quality of the writing you are consuming.
Yeah, I'm going to have to say that IRC is to blame here. Poor typing is endemic on IRC, and is even worse on Second Life, where the graphics detract from the online communication.
If you want to increase or maintain your English skills, socialize with people who put an emphasis on proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Without those fundamentals in the people around you, your dialogue will eventually sink to match their levels.
If you're wondering, yes, this would probably be considered elitist by many online neophytes. I personally prefer to call it 'having standards'. :)
Yesterday, cleaning out the back room, I stumbled across an old photo album my partner had never seen. I told her how much I hated my grade 4 year. I didn't know it at the time, but I was forced to write with a pen for the first time during the Arab Oil Embargo. For me, it was the elementary school classroom pencil and eraser embargo.
The attractive Ms Pinder also wanted me to adopt a cursive script. I had a form of written dyslexia: letters from any word that might complete my sentence would jump the queue in the middle of whatever word I was laboriously spooling out. I couldn't slow myself down enough to use either a pencil or a pen, but at least with a pencil I had a fighting chance.
It happens I lived in a small town just a country road away from where a classic computer nerd had grown up, long before this meme was established. He was already off in the big world helping to invent APL, but I would visit his parents and play in his old bedroom with his amazing robot cars and stuff. His father used to tell me the story about the first day he left the house after purchasing an early edition black and white television. When he came home, his son had every piece of it, down to the last tube, laid out on the living room carpet. His father described him as having the messiest room he'd ever seen (I felt I had a shot to compete with that one) but that when it came to his wires, they were laid out like he was taking dictation from God. My Dad had hung out with him leading an after school church group in his high school graduation year and he had shown my dad, who also a bit of engineering school, some mod stuff about computers.
Since I was an easily bored child, one night when I was making trouble as an eight year old, my dad randomly started to show me stuff he had learned from D. He illustrated the binary number system with an egg carton and some black marbles. I got it right away. Afterwards, whenever I got a boring arithmetic problem in school, I would first change it to some other random base system, solve it, then change it back to decimal. OK, you wanted me to show my working, there it is. I was sending out major distress signals (hey, I'm a little bored here) but the stun wardens of the 1970s were unable to clue in.
Ink and cursive writing and obsession with spelling drove me to new heights of frustration. For a ten year old in 1973, I had a pretty forward view of computers. I knew the spell checker was coming, I just didn't know when, or in exactly what form. The book about the nature of algorithms my dad had checked out of the university library made this clear to me: if you could define a mechanical procedure, a computer would certainly do it. The only apparent road block was actually getting my hands on such a machine. Three years later I got my hand on a TI-30, it was the best I could manage, though I did also manage to get the 8008 data sheets from a military surplus mail order outfit. I just didn't want to mow the entire subdivision all summer in order to own one, and even if I did own one, it wasn't going to spell check my essays.
So there I am, surrounded my cultural artifacts from the future, with not much hands-on opportunity, speculating wistfully about exactly what I could get away with in school, given the future existence of these machines.
My attitude was this: if I've managed to get enough of the right letters out of my trick fingers that the teacher unambiguously knows what word I've intended, then I've done enough. What's she ragging on me about? I was ripe for a copy of Shannon's 1948 monograph "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", which I would have devoured as a young child. I was already thinking hard about numeric representation and English words as code points in a larger representation space. The fly in the ointment, I realized, is that the homonyms would continue to be a problem long after the computers arrived. So I worked hard to spell the homonyms correctly (and the plural
Comment removed based on user account deletion