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.
Tpying ahs runed my ablty.
it's ruining my ability to finish a
HAND.
... penmanship is no longer a scholastic requirement. Long live printing!
You have to be kidding me. Where would this network be today if I could spell?
http://rs79.vrx.net/works/usenet/alt.sex/
http://rs79.vrx.net/works/usenet/terms/froup/
Need Mercedes parts ?
My handwriting has been reduced to chicken-scratch and the characters vary between block and script for no apparent reason; it is just what comes out. I sometimes even have trouble writing characters such as 'e' or 'q' where I have to concentrate to make sure they look legible.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
Thank god for spill check.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I usually try to stick to full sentences when typing(though my abuse of commas and parenthetical comments is egregious) so I don't think that it has done my grammar much harm.
Spelling, also, seems to be ok. Because I can't quite trust automatic spell checks, I still find that making spelling mistakes carries a small cost in time and annoyance. However, my spelling mistakes do annoy me a great deal more when I am writing; because I don't have an easy way to look up corrected spellings and corrections tend to be messy.
As for "writing" more broadly, I've not found any reason to think that computers reduce the need for that. Until we come up with an interface that allows me to dump mental state directly to the machine, and shove that around, writing will still be the only real option for expressing complex ideas in a reasonably precise and concise manner.
Typing has definitely reduced my ability to hand write quickly and legibly, but not my ability to spell. I think spelling has been affected more by the fact that I write much less now than a long time ago.
Having quick/convenient access to a spell checker, thesaurus, and dictionary has increased my orthography. My penmanship is another story but that wasn't the word processors fault to begin with.
When I get out the fountain pen I write about two lines and my hand starts to hurt. I have to stop and use a dictionary to spell and I have to think before I write otherwise my sentenced on-run and make don't sense much.
I have always been a terrible speller it was always my least favorite part of school because it was a matter more about rote memorization and nothing to do with logic. I find the instant feed back loop from modern spell checkers, the ones that underline mistakes once I complete a word, help me to learn the correct spelling.
My problem is even now that my spelling is better I still have no confidence in my ability to spell when I don't have that safety net.
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.
I think you're problem is their are people out they're who got better grammer then ewe and your just jealous.
It's a lot of things, but not typing. Of course, tyling produces typoos, but that's not a matter of spelling, it's a matter of hitting the worng keys. A little proofreading fixes that.
Spill chuckers oar bad four spilling. Eye wish pee pull wood stoop ewe sing them.
Personally, when I see someone using the wrong homonym, like "the ball is in there court", it has a negative effect on my opinion of their intelligence. The same goes for the misuse of apostrophes; WHY do people think you need an apostrophe for a plural? Sometimes I'll reply with a link to the Bob the Angry Flower cartoon "Bob's quick giude to the apostrophe, you idiots".
Maybe it's being innundated by posts from sub-adults who are texting in class instead of paying attention to the teacher.
2 L8, brb
Free Martian Whores!
I've always had bad handwriting, now the only thing I write is a debt card signature and even doctors would look at it and ask "WTF is that supposed to say?".
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
lol wut
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.
My handwriting legibility is low, but my spelling and grammar isn't affected. Maybe people who allow themselves to type poorly also write poorly with a pen, but that was originally intentional, right?
Handwriting vs. typing has nothing to do with grammar and spelling. Just read from quality sources and write or type with proper grammar and spelling. If you spend most of your time reading Twitter the quality of your grammar and spelling will drop whether you handwrite or type. When I was a kid we were told to read the NY Times to improve our vocabulary and grammar.
Developers: We can use your help.
Ewe shed knot tryst you're spill chucker.
Free Martian Whores!
It is about perceived effort and value. Writing a full letter on traditional paper involves the increased effort to foresee what will be written down, so that once in the middle of the letter you won't have to go back and correct it (which implies writing it all over again). This "fear" of errors decreases the likelihood of committing them. Topic, orthography, grammar and even calligraphy (which increases the likelihood of your message getting across) are all helped by this conscious effort. Whereas typing on a machine has made our lives easier in the sense of mass producing shit :) and tons of unneeded documents, but has severely diminished our abilities to write a simple sentence down on a piece of paper without making a fool of ourselves.
Moreover, consider that in an organization almost 80% (citation needed) of all documents are all templates, the only requirement being the changing of some header or the person receiving this memo or whatnot.
LOL :)
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
I can't say that my speeling has gotten any worse the more I type, but something I have noticed is I cannot for the life of me remember any of my PINs or other such codes. My fingers know where to go while I'm at the console, but the last time I was asked for the code to disable my security system I could not for the life of me remember four numbers. Had to dial the phone to figure it out.
This signature intentionally left blank.
I'm a pretty decent touch typist, about 300 characters per minute. My spelling and grammar are quite good, even in my second language (English).
Putting pen to paper however, does give me the same effect that you're having, but not quite as you describe it. It's not that I suddenly don't know how to write certain words - it's just that I'm used to writing them at 300 characters per minute, but using a pen I can probably only do 60. In other words, I have to slow down my thinking.
This results in badly spelled words which does look like I'm somewhat dyslexic, but when I focus on being slow, I don't have an issue when using a regular pen. Doing this is highly frustrating - it feel like you're an idiot, which only exacerbates the issue.
I've seen the exact same thing happen in people who aren't used to using a keyboard. My parents are very used to writing things by hand and can probably write 100+ characters per minute that way, but give them a keyboard and they are slowed to a crawl and their error rate soars.
As for IRC, IM, SMS etc. lowering your standards? 4 sre. Y wrt fll wrd whn u cn sve tm?
You can't make other people write proper English (or whatever language) if they don't want to. All you can do is write it properly yourself. If you want to be a smart ass, you can always correct their writing for them if they're talking to you. Or pretend (or as the case may be, not) that you haven't the faintest idea what they're trying to say.
Once you make people realise, that they aren't saving time by not writing full words (or the like), they'll either stop bugging you (and thus won't detract from your own abilities) or they'll start writing properly again.
Just hit them over the head a few times when they write stuff like "I should of done", "Its not you're fault" or some of the similar mistakes. But let me hear that you through a thrown threw a window, understood?
I force myself to spell correctly (even when typing) and can't stand what I read within MMOs, or even in the workplace most of the time these days. I also try to never use a calculator, and it allows me to retain my ability to compute in my head. The grammatical ability of the average person I game with is just atrocious. I am chastised for correcting people with "what are you an English teacher?". What they don't realize however is that to the rest of the world, they sound ignorant. I do find that I type quite a bit faster than I write these days. My writing was never great, but it has definitely declined. More importantly, I tried to write in cursive not long ago, and realized that my brain/hands have forgotten some of the letters. If you don't use it, you might not lose it entirely, but you do lose your proficiency!
If you need to have good handwriting to earn a living you a probably working for a greeting card company doing the inserts.
For everyone else... It is just faster and more economical to type.
Yes, with the advent of the auto-spell checker, you don't have to often memorize certain spellings but in a business environments where deadlines are looming, do you need to whip out a dictionary every time you need to write an email?
For a car analogy, think of how people who never learned how to use a manual and only drove automatics. Yes, their manual shifting skills are somewhat degraded, but if they can drive a car fine then who are we to say they need to learn how to use a stick.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I have found the same thing. Though years of IRC and IM have definitely made me lean further and further towards typing how I speak, and further away from how I would write a formal paper. Here, I tend towards speech... because....well.... fuck the gramar and speling nazis in their asses.
Though marrying a southie girl has actually caused me to remember many of my grammar rules.
"Baby 'I saw' not 'I seen'" :)
"fuck you"
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
What is the point of this confession or whatever it seems to be? Do you want my attention? Do you want me to agree with you? I don't... I've been typing and using the interwebz for about 14 years now with plenty of IRC, 1337 speak, and degenerate behavior --- and in all that I have maintained my cognitive capacity to recognize the difference between the variants and the proper.
I think your problem (if you feel there is any, such as an employer wondering why you write like a 12 year old), probably stems from the lack of regard for your variance as 'variance', and embracing that way too often, if not completely, as a way of life.
In excess, nearly anything can be problematic. Maintain a balance between work and play; in this case having a deliberate regard for maintaining both your interwebz-bs-style and your proper-for-work-and-standards style.
What I mean is... you need to actually give a shit about what you're doing. Degenerate yourself for fun, but not for habit.
Your problem isn't that it's rote memorization -- I'm terrible at anything requiring rote memorization. Your problem (and a lot of other peoples') is you don't read enough books. I urge you and everyone else to acquaint yourselves with you local public library, or if you're in college, its library.
Readaholics never have trouble with spelling, unless all they read is the internet.
Free Martian Whores!
My spelling and hand writing are absolutely atrocious, and would be with or without computers as I'm mildly dyslexic (this has been tested and documented). In the case of my spelling however, I've found it improving as I use computers. When I have a spell check constantly telling me what I'm doing wrong and how to fix it, eventually some things stick. It doesn't work for everything (such as using the wrong word with the right spelling), but it helps. Not to mention being able to hand in work that's nicely typed and legible, something that would be difficult for me otherwise.
As for the quality of your grammar deteriorating, that's probably caused by reading things written by chimps. An infinite number of chimps on an infinite number of typewriters will write the complete works of Shakespeare eventually, but a few dozen on IRC won't.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Aren't both handwritten and typed words spelled the same??? So whats the issue?
I became very aware of grammar and spelling in high school. To that end I integrated it into my life. Typing has successfully kept my writing messy and I do find myself having to slow down the brain to write some stuff. If you stick to the fundamentals and apply them while typing, you should have no problems. Practice!
(1st sig) If this were a snappy sig, you'd be reading it right now. (2nd sig) I'm a karma whore. >Insert FUD here
Didn't you go to school? You spend a good 12 years of your life writing on paper pretty much every day. When you hit university you become a master at writing by hand. The only real option is that you were never good at writing to begin with.
It's not like leetspeak was invented by some English professor who just sat down at a computer one day and said 'hey replacing letters with numbers is a lot easier than just using regular words'. It was invented by dumbass kids who weren't any good in school, never read books and played video games all the time. Really, is that the sort of environment where great literary minds flourish?
And that was the last Terry Fox run I ever participated in.
Could someone explain how "Telex machines" date the submitter? Wikipedia isn't much help on this.
Thanks!
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
For example: If I'm trying to write the word calender I always forget how many a's and e's to use. When I'm typing I think the word 'calender' and my fingers seem to remember how the word is spelled.
If you've ever watched a spelling be (don't pretend you haven't) you'll have noticed that the contestants will sometimes trace the words out on the back of their cards.
I can say [REDACTED] anytime I want!
I used to be very proud of my handwriting. It now looks like the work of a drunken four year old.
I rarely hand-write anything anymore, and find that although I can type over 80wpm, I can barely hand-scratch an illegible paragraph without significant hand pain. My writing quality - and even my signature - has gone downhill over the last 10 years to the point where it's almost useless.
What I think is now putting it over the edge is that I broke my thumb, and although it's now healed, it's painful to properly grip a pen. In the old days, forcing myself to write would have probably been enough physio therapy to help that, but I do it so seldom now, it just keeps me from trying.
If we have a nuclear war and all our electronics get toasted, we're in trouble...
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
When I'm guessing, I type it into the little google text box to double-check. Thats more reliable than a spell-checker.
I think it has, I know that I at least rely more on spellcheck than I should. Especially with the autocorrect, at least when it just does a squiggly line I have to look at the correct spelling from a list of possibles. When it just automatically fixes my teh's to the's, there is no reason for me to change the way I type. What would scare me is to turn off spellcheck for a day. I wonder if I would even be able to respond to emails from my co-workers. And the children, they are even worse off, they are growing up with this kind of correction, giving them no incentive to learn to spell.
I don't know about where you live, but the school curriculums I see are not doing nearly enough to prepare our kids for a lifetime of typed communication, which they surely face. Penmanship, while still important, is the only way kids are being taught in most schools. It's time to teach kids to be proficient typists and spellers using keyboards to at least the same extent as old fashioned written communication.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
I keep hearing people bemoan the loss of technology that has been overshadowed by computers... why? Why is writing by hand special? The whole point is to get information down in some way, and using a keyboard to type it into a computer is superior in every way. If you say that it makes it less human you are simply begging the question -- how do you define "human" and why is it necessarily a good thing? If you went back in time an asked an australopithecine how they felt about evolving into homo sapiens, they would be terrified and try to do everything they could to remain australopithecines. Why are we so afraid of change when it could be so beneficial to us and our ancestors?
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
"Ruining" would imply that my ability was at least marginally good to begin with...
The question posed in the body is whether typing has ruined your ability to write things out by hand -- either printing or writing.
For me the answer to that question is yes.
But most people seem to be responding about their ability to spell. In that respect the only thing I've noticed really is that certain words have become hard-wired and I might think "their" but between my brain and the keyboard, "there" is what comes out and I have to back up and correct it.
I've also heard that message sent by the brain to different fingers travel at different speeds. Thus when I'm typing furious furiously, i, o, and u often don't come out in the correct order and I'll have to correct again.
Typing is much faster than writing, but I find that typing all day does not affect my ability to spell when writing by hand. In fact, because hand-writing is more permanent (there is no backspace), I find its slower pace actually improves the way I write, for I have to spend more time thinking rather than just typing and correcting.
No doubt others will be in a similar position when I say that my script writing (cursive) looks terrible, but that is merely a lack of practice. Bad script is not a modern invention, however: while at a naval museum in Virginia, I could not decipher the captain's log book for all of his chicken-scratchings.
My block printing is readable, albeit very small --- I write in an eight-point font.
My biggest lament about computers and the Internet is that they have reduced the already small working-set of words to what may truly be the lowest common denominator. There are many fine words in the English language that I would love to use regularly but cannot because people don't know their definitions or dismiss me as an arrogant SOB for using big words. The flip side is that when people can't spell "definitely" (definatley) or "lose" (loose), I immediately stop reading and disregard their comments regardless of quality or pertinence.
Being sloppy and not paying attention to spelling has reduced your ability to spell.
Typing something versus writing it with a pen is no excuse for bad grammar and spelling.
If this really worries you, how about spelling things properly when you're typing? The world will thank you.
Why would you want to? No matter how funny, insightful, or interesting, a first post is almost guaranteed to be modded down. If you have excellent karma it shouldn't matter (karma to burn, baby!), but it still does, because a comment that's modded to oblivion won't be seen by anyone, so why bother posting it at all?
In this case I'm modding myself down with the "no karma bonus" because it's only directed to you, and you'll see it in your "comments" notification.
Free Martian Whores!
I'll add +1 to your sample. To be honest, I've noticed my spelling becoming much poorer both in script and in type. For me there is also a transpositioning of both letters and sometimes words, which sounds almost like a facet of dyslexia (I don't have other features of dyslexia that I know of). I don't know what the cause is, but my guess would have been automatic spell-checkers making it unnecessary to think about whether a word is correctly spelled or not.
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
It's a multitouch keyboard that does dynamic spelling correction based on what you've already typed, what you type next (it issues backspaces to correct prior keystrokes), and the fractional location of a finger-tap within or between key areas. It's slick beyond words. Apple bought the tech, and is ever-so-slowly dribbling it out in their iPhone/iPod Touch and trackpads.
This is true. I read (er, have read..) so much that I automatically can tell when something's misspelled. It's really quite handy.
and I've had the opposite experience of the OP. Word processing has increased my typing speed by 50% over typewriters. (I type with three or four fingers at 60wpm, too fast to consider learning the right way.) I've become a better speller because I get instant feedback when I screw up. I've learned not to use 'white out' on the screen. Grammar? Nothing is going to help you if you can't get your words in the right places or understand to use a plural verb after a conditional. SURELY you don't rely on 'grammar checker' to bitch at you for using passive voice. It's useless.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Just like IDEs have ruined people's ability to write syntactically correct code.
I don't consider myself "old", but I'm 30 and from the time I started Junior High through college all my reports had to be typed and saved on a floppy (lol), by my Senior year of High School everything needed to be saved on a zip and by College I was taking my class notes on my laptop just to save time and it was easier to do a "find" in a word document that sift through actual paper notebooks.
My career choices didn't help being in the creative industry for 10 years now where I spend all day long creating graphics and laying out text for multiple projects I have no need to "manually write down anything" - if you catch me in the hallway, I'll just thumb type the notes in my Blackberry's memo pad...
But there is a down side I suppose. I have trouble signing my name sometimes as well as if I have to fill a form out at the doctors office it's nearly illegible, so I find I have to rely on my wife or friends to "write" stuff for me as they tend to have less computer experience and therefore better handwriting.
Ave Molech Setting
I used to hate writing. First of all, I'm left handed so writing with a pen often meant ink stains on my hand and smeared handwriting. Secondly, I never felt that my handwriting speed could keep up with my brain speed. I'd always have to slow down my thoughts to get them on paper. Finally, I also couldn't easily make edits to my writing. Deciding to reword a sentence or move a paragraph meant ugly looking cross outs, hard-to-write-over white-out or completely rewriting the page I was working on.
Then, I got to type on a computer for the first time. Suddenly, there were no ink stains, my typing speed was better able to keep pace with my thinking speed, and edits were a quick cut/copy/paste away. Suddenly, I found that I loved writing and wrote anytime I could.
I still can write pen on paper but whenever possible I compose my writing on the computer first so my pen-on-paper writing is as neat as possible.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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'. :)
I too rely on the little red line under a word that may be misspelled. I try to find and correct my own mistakes as I type since I can 'feel' them as I go. But I've gotten to rely on the built in spell checker to make sure.
Has using electronic communication affected my handwriting? Not really. I tend to write out notes to myself all the time when I'm working and I will occasionally sit down and write letters. I agree with some of the posters above that having to hand write something makes me sit and think things out to their logical conclusion since I can't easily delete and rewrite.
I've also found a reverse effect. People aren't used to reading cursive any more. Printing is just fine but when I write a letter in cursive I get comments that they have trouble reading it. I've checked my handwriting and it really isn't bad enough to put the blame completely on me.
One other thing I've found is that writing a letter isn't as easy as it used to be since anything I write will be 'stale' once it is received. Electronic communication is immediate and fresh. So my letters have to deal with subject matter that generally isn't addressed in e-mails or I know that it will be a repeat of something at some point.
Letters are a dying art. Getting a real letter (not just a greeting card with a sentence or two) happens so rarely these days that it is treated as an oddity.
I suppose I can thank our weekly team meetings for helping keep my handwriting skills up to snuff. I always take notes at the meetings so I can remember what we talked about and make to-do lists. Sometimes, the meetings become long and tedious, but now when I feel myself itching to look at the clock I can just remember that I'm practicing an important skill: writing on paper with a pen. And I'll know it's all worth it.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
I've found that while my handwriting and spelling abilities haven't suffered too much, I do tend to type sloppily and count on spell checking to clean things up afterward. But this has led to some funny mistakes.
I got an email back from a friend once asking "How did you know I was having problems shitting?!?!?" I was totally stumped and confused, and he finally had to rub my nose in it, told me to actually read my original email. In regards to an issue I was working with him to resolve, I had meant to type "Sorry about the inconvenience", had typo-ed, and Outlook had helpfully corrected it to "Sorry about the incontinence".
Totally changed the tone of the email.
When I was in school one of our school's best spellers was a guy who was a pretty average student. He would sometimes win spelling contests in the school and represent us in regional contests (I don't think he ever made it further than state level), but his academic record was pretty ordinary. I knew him for years and considered him a friend, although not a close one, and I can say that I just think he was a pretty average student. He was no genius. That experience convinced me that people who can spell well may not necessarily be the best and brightest.
From personal experience, the more I studied foreign languages (I am reasonably proficient in 3 besides English), the worse my ability to spell English became. I noticed a definite correlation there. However, I think my grammar improved. I use dictionary.com sometimes to look up words I am unsure about, but I write better than most people I know. I'm always surprised at how many people, especially younger ones, have no idea what the difference is between there, their and they're. That's just one example. As a point of interest, foreign language speakers who study English won't confuse there/their/they're, your/you're and its/it's, but they'll do things like write "could of" when it's really "could've" because they are going by what they hear. They are not helped when idiot native speakers write "could of" or "use to" (it's "used to") though.
It's called evolution. We developed a tool to save time, can mass-produce that tool in a standardised format and find it infinitely preferable to older alternatives. I can type over 100WPM. I can write *legibly* about 15-20, faster if only I have to read it. That's about as much as could ever be said for my handwriting, anyway: legible.
My mother once complained to my primary school (aged about 8) that the teachers were saying my handwriting wasn't good enough. Her rule was, if it was good enough for the teacher to tell if the answer was right or wrong, then it wasn't a problem. The teachers disagreed until she visited, but soon relented. I think that's saved me a lot of unnecessary hassle over the years. I think it's also entirely correct. If I'm not writing it for other people, it doesn't matter. If I'm writing it for other people, it matters that they can read it. If I'm writing for *display*, that's another matter entirely. I can't remember the last time that was necessary.
I communicate. How I do it is to use the most convenient medium. In the same way that people decried the demise of the quill, or stone-engraving, so people are getting rid of the pen except for quick notes. How long do you think it will *genuinely* last once we have some sort of electronic paper? My guess is months, not decades.
When was the last time you employed someone whose CV was hand-written? :-)
Computers are making it possible for us to delegate some responsibilities, such as spelling, to them.
We are letting them do this.
This is not a "loss" of the ability to spell, any more than cars are "losing" us the ability to get around.
(I am aware that cars have made us less able to get around without cars, but this is hardly relevant as we can still get around. Same with spelling.)
The really interesting bit is that I do not feel unable to spell, nor unable to remember words (though I mostly use wordweb or google for this previously intra-mental task). And people with cars feel able to do their shopping in town in 20 minutes. We are not wrong. We are just counting these technological artifacts as part of ourselves.
Typing is moving your ability to spell around. Inside you. (For certain values of you).
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
I noticed the exact same thing. Im french by birth and some weeks ago i just started writing something down, i cant remember what it was, but i noticed how often i had to stop to think about my spelling. It might not just be the keyboard and typing but also that most of my work is done in english. That im loosing my french spelling... who knows! But I can confirm that im having a much harder time writing and spelling than i used to have.
Of course, I probably make as many typos per word as I misspell by hand...but thanks to the greatest gift of technology to the scrivener since the pencil eraser—the DELETE key—it is easy to make them disappear. Typos happen. Back when I was pounding away on college papers using my mother's Remington portable (the one with a greasy square of leather stuck on top of it so I could rest my head on it and doze in between inspired sentences), I would use erasable paper. The bottom of the typewriter frequently filled up with eraser fuzzies to the point where the keys wouldn't move, so I'd have to turn it upside down and whack it to empty it.
If you were asking whether using electronic devices to communicate is deleterious to spelling and grammar skills, I'd have to say that, considering the ways in which these devices are used, it probably is. But it has nothing to do with typing. Standards are lower in email; typos and grammatical infelicities seem to be tolerated by people in email, though those same offenses in, say, a published book would cause complaint. The same is true of online fora. Were I to dare correct someone's spelling or grammar on /., I would be condemned as a "spelling nazi". I hardly need comment on that destroyer of articulate communication, the practice of "texting" and its egregious ally, "133t5p34k" (um...did I spell that right?).
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
yes... dis ting has mo creeped in2 MS based IDE. sum times best way to xplain things is to give a C code. MS VC++ has incorporated (voila I got the spelin rite!) dis spell chk while writing code itself... dats i think a good ting...wat was da topic???
Ignoring the fact that my handwriting was always crap, typing HAS made it worse. I don't think it's had any effect on my spelling.
However, using modern browsers like Firefox & Safari with spellcheckers have probably hurt it. It's not a problem at home, butt when I'mm at wrok with IE, I kant spel anymore.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
That's simply not true, both in my own personal experience and by a simple look at most of the articles on the /. front page today.
Also, I read at "Raw and uncut", so I'll always see what you posted. Not that I'll necessarily read it... the 3-page nigger copypastas get skipped pretty quickly.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
it could be worst.
No, I don't have any such problems. First, as far as handwriting is concerned: I have recently rediscovered fountain pen as the ideal handwriting instrument ever invented and my handwriting stated slowly, but steadily improving. Perhaps it's just the joy of writing. :-) Second, spelling: There is no way in which a spell checker could *teach* me anything, ever. I am literate and well-read and I simply don't make systematic mistakes. Being a skilled translator might also have something to do with it. :-) Not even my second language - English - poses any substantial problems to me. As far as *accidental* mistakes are concerned, I am, of course, grateful for having a spell checker to highlight what it thinks that I have mistyped, but beyond that, my brain is quite capable of making its own decisions.
Bottom line: You don't read enough. Go fetch some good novels.
Ezekiel 23:20
Knowing how to spell is orthogonal to how you're writing. What are you asking exactly?
There are many skills that used to be required learning for all, that are now known only to a handful of hobbiests. I guess I'm not sure why it's a "problem" that handwriting should be one of them. For that matter, handwriting as a universal skill has had a pretty short run if you put it in historical perspective.
When I have reason to set pen to paper, I'm still able to convey my meaning. It may not be as pretty as if I still "wrote" instead of "printing" (or then again... my penmanship was never that great), but so what? When I need my message to look pretty - i.e. because it's for a prospective employer - the person receiving it is going to have a definition of "pretty" that requires me to use a computer anyway.
If for some reason I'm caught without a washing machine I find that frustrating, too, but I don't lament the lost art of beating clothes on the rocks.
Have you considered the possibility that you're just getting dumber?
... then the fine folks at SpellStar came up with their version of relief: http://img.thedailywtf.com/images/mark/Mr_Magenta_Personal_Folder/notRolaids-small.jpg
Typing? No. Internet message boards? Yes.
Are hand written notes actually becoming obsolete? In the majority of the rest of the world (where they don't regularly read /.), the average person still uses pen and paper. I'm a programmer by trade, nerd by demeanor, and I, begrudgingly, have to write things down every once in a while. I don't think handwriting is becoming obsolete, not by a long shot. Its very easy to say that on some of the nerdiest board on the internets, and have many people agree with you, but that's only because we live in a vacuum.
And I love my spellcheck.
Typing hasn't ruined my ability to spell at all. The more I read and the more I type, the more my spelling ability improves. Disable spelling and grammar checkers and take pride in what you write. That means proofread it the old fashioned way. Eventually people will compliment you on your writing ability.
people who have conservative opinions about writing and spelling tend to complain about the poor quality of language used in online communication. "omg orly? lol ttfn." if the reader doesn't understand the abbreviated strings, it's just noise. if the reader understands, then it is the same as "oh my god, oh really? laughing out loud, ta-ta for now." in its expanded form, is it bad writing? not particularly. the abbreviations are a commonly understood shorthand. to the extent that it's not commonly understood, it might be difficult to read, but it doesn't indicate poor communication.
these same complainers talk about how online communication hurts writing skills. i think people write a lot more online than they wrote 25 years ago. we're not handwriting letters on paper and licking stamps any more. but i send hundreds of emails every week. and instead of writing longhand or typing on a typewriter or dictating text into an audio recorder and sending it to the typing pool, i use a text editor or word processor or text widget.
back to the omg and lol abbreviatons. if people were that concerned about reading such shortcuts, they could use software to fix it, either on the transmit or receive sides. we could use predictive text systems like T9 or IMEs like those used to type Asian languages. a person could use such systems to convert the abbreviations into more fully-fledged language.
now what about writing skills? "omg lolz" suffices in an im or sms message. if you're at work, maybe it's not so cool to write to a patient, "plz call the lab and schedule a chest mri, and have them send me the results of ur blood work." then again, doctors are known for their cryptic handwriting and rx abbrevs - sig 1 po qid pc prn. it's important to understand the message that your writing style conveys.
I think the process of reading a lot of online forums has damaged my spelling. In order to read Slashdot, you have to be able to scan over random misspellings and typos. Consequently, they don't jump out at me in my own writing anymore. That's my excuse for my own deterioration, anyway.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
In MY day, we had to draw every letter individually, then manually arrange them into words! And there weren't no spell check either! If you spelled a word wrong, the only person what would underline it with a red zig-zags was your teacher!
And get off my lawn!
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
"I've noticed that my grammar is also affected"
I run a grammar checker too. My grammar has also improved.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
I generally use the "underline" from spell-checks as a "please try again" instead of just right-clicking and choosing the correct suggested word... and I do this immediately following a mistake; mid-sentence, (control+back-space to delete the entire word) and then respelling the word until it no longer is underlined in red before continuing (vs. typing everything out and then retroactively going back and correcting any spelling mistakes). This way I am correcting my own mistake and then retyping the word **correctly** instead of being given the answer. I've found that this method has helped my spelling immensely. In the past, I had a horrible tendency of always spelling "schedule" as "schedual." After a long enough time you begin to catch that spelling error before pressing the space-bar and it is underlined.... and then you just begin spelling it correctly.
So my suggestion is to change the way you use the red/green spelling/grammar-check underlining... instead of using it to fix mistakes and errors, use it mainly as a way to identify that it is wrong and attempt to correct it without right-clicking for suggestions. (Again, "CTRL+Backspace" to backspace the entire word is a huge time-saver.) Of course if you get stuck and after a couple of tries you haven't gotten it, then you right-click. This will help to improve your retention of the correct spelling of the word after having spent time trying to correct it.
Now, this does, of course, sacrifice your typed WPM... especially in the beginning. However, as your spelling improves, so will your WPM. (I believe I currently average around 75 WPM @ 100% accuracy but am closer to 120 WPM if I do not correct as I type.)
I haven't hand written letters since I got my C-64. When a recent job application required a hand written section (who ever heard of such a thing!) I had to type it out and then write it. That gave me time to think about the wording and of course, check the spelling. Of course, now that everyone I want to communicate with has email, I don't send letters at all unless it is a cover letter with a resume. Even those are being submitted on line these days.
For those of you that can't spell too well and depend on a spell checker to help out...
It won't always get you out of trouble. My brother asked me to proof read his resume. He used a spell checker and thought that there were not going to be any problems there. Yes, the spelling in the resume was correct but among glaring errors he wrote that he "attended three years at a local collage."
If you don't see what is wrong with that statement, you have been relying too heavily on spell checkers. They do help but they are no substitute for knowing how to spell.
The problem with autocorrection is they frequently autocorrect incorrectly and often the "corrected" sentence is less understandable than the mistyped version since the corrected word is no longer recognizable as a mangling of the intended word.
Squirrel!
nuf sayd.
i hAve been worKing as a softWare deVeloPer for over x19 yEars and have found that uSing a keyBoard everyDay does not seem to have had any impAct on my spelLing abiliTies, but for some reaSon it has caused me to insert rAndom capItal letters in the cenTer of words; for some reaSon i alSo end most senTences with a semiColon ratHer than the cusToMary perIod;
--
Silfax
My ability to spell hasn't been impacted (I have never been a fan of spell checkers), but my ability to write by hand certainly has. My handwriting looks the same as it always has -- it's legible enough. However, I do it more slowly due to a lack of practice, and I get tired MUCH more easily. It used to be that I could write by hand for an hour or more. Now I have to put down the pen and shake some blood back into my hand every couple of minutes.
More importantly, when I need to take notes, I show up with a netbook, not a pad and pen. I'm going to end up typing it up anyhow, and I don't write anywhere near 80 words per minute, so why not skip that step and type it up in the first place?
If you were wondering about cursive script -- I abandoned that long before I became heavily reliant on typing.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
If anything, I've noticed my spelling has improved since Pidgin started checking it while I type.
My writing has become terse and choppy much like lines of code. I now need to proofread my writing and string together the sentences to make them more natural.
love is just extroverted narcissism
I've been typing nearly my entire life. Spelling is not, and has never been a challenge to me. I can not recognize any association between my typing, my handwriting, and my spelling abilities. I almost never write by hand. The only side effect of this that I can tell is that my handwriting is either slow, or ugly, but the spelling still comes naturally.
Perhaps you have another problem...
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
Actually, it's been the other way. Specifically when learning new languages, I've found that reading a text and typing it at the same time is a very good way to learn how to spell the words, keep new vocabulary in your mind, and a lot of other things. This is the best way (besides talking) that I've found to learn a new language. Maybe this works with your mother language too, but I have not tested.
Spelling has probably improved because I get instant feedback and correction, but my handwriting resembles something a third grader would produce.
Your problem isn't that it's rote memorization -- I'm terrible at anything requiring rote memorization. Your problem (and a lot of other peoples') is you don't read enough books. I urge you and everyone else to acquaint yourselves with you local public library, or if you're in college, its library.
Readaholics never have trouble with spelling, unless all they read is the internet.
(Emphasis added)
I beg to differ. I read a lot (though mostly Wheel of Time... repeatedly) and I do not have good spelling. Same as the GP, in school I was always bad at any subject which required rote memorization and spelling was always my worst.
I don't think that typing has made my ability to spell any worse since it has always been terrible but my writing has become almost legendary for how bad it is. Sometime over the years I created my own font which is a horrible blend of script, monospaced and block letters which can only be deciphered by me, and not always by me.
I'm simply used to writing things correctly, even with the keyboard. In all languages that I know. :)
The good thing is that if you were good at it once, you can become good at it again, in very very short times. Something like a month.
I noticed it, when I had to, because I got a job where I suddenly was surrounded by 20 French and Portuguese dudes every morning, that I had to communicate properly with.
(No, my English is not perfect at the moment. It's because it's my third language, and in the summer, I just prefer to go outside and talk to real people in my native language.
And I always enable my spell checker only when I'm done writing something.
But you are right that you lose your trained abilities when you don't need them. That's efficiency at its best, and there is nothing wrong with it.
An example of where it actually is bad, is our inability to run at least 100 miles in one run, like humans could do some 10k years ago, because of our habit, to wear shoes and to think their "assistance" would do us any good.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
But spell check sure makes me lazy.
Many times I find myself not actually trying to spell the word, but rather trying to trick MS word into spelling it for me. One thing I have noticed lately, and the respective companies may want to stand up and take notice, is that if I type something into google search it does a way better job of spell checking than MS Word by a fair margin. Perhaps this has to do with the search algorithm, perhaps it has to do with online resources. In either case I don't see why this won't come to pass. I am online 99% of the time when on a computer these days anyway. Perhaps Google Docs should notch it up a bit and knock off MS.
Anyway the other point, is that MS Word is American. Default install and dictionary is American. I mean American English. I am Canadian. I spell color like colour, or at least I am supposed to. However even now "colour" has a damn red line under it saying it is incorrect. I think this will have a profound effect on the English language over the years as more and more people depend on it... it will homogenize the English language for good or ill to the American default. Sure I bet there are language packs, and alternate installs, but no one uses them, or they are a pain in the ass etc... Anyway just another reason to say MS is evil I guess.
My spelling and grammar have not deteriorated at all, over the years. However, I find writing anything in longhand to be tedious and painful, now. I type 100 words-per-minute, and the quality of my writing suffers terribly when I'm forced to write anything long-hand, because it's so much slower than my usual written communication. I simply no longer have the patience for producing text so slowly and inefficiently.
I regularly (well, not regularly, but often enough) write my wife love letters on specially purchased (read: expensive) paper. Doing so creates a strong incentive to keep my hand-writing skills current and well practiced (and also helps ensure certain return favors on a regular basis).
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
This sort of thing really blows my mind. When necessary skills are taught by a machine, there's an over-reliance on the machines. I write short-stories and the like, and I prefer to hand-write the first draft and the second draft is when it goes into the computer. It slows me down and keeps the stories coherent. If I'm typing, my fingers start moving faster than my mind and I tend to start rambling.
My point is, all knowledge is communicated through language. If we can't educate each other on spelling, word structure and punctuation, relying on the computer to do it for us, there are basic literacy fundamentals that are not being met. Sure, computer literacy is important, but language literacy isn't just knowing how to read, but also how to write. The brain needs to know how to form words, and just pushing buttons to make a computer assemble the words is not teaching knowledge. It's teaching laziness. I might argue that while computer literacy may be on the increase, its at the expense of basic language literacy.
Neutiquam erro
It's the opposite for me....
When I wrote, I frequently misspelled words. I'd take a 'stab' at it, and move on. If it turned out to be incorrect...well...I didn't much care. I had no trouble reading the words (correctly, or as I wrote them) and I could never bring myself to intentionally sit down and try to remember word spellings.
Even if I wanted to correct the mistake, it took a lot of effort. If I cross it out and move on, it looks sloppy. If I'm using a pencil, I can erase (and it still looks sloppy). It's quite clear to the reader that I screwed up the word anyway.
With computers, the whole thing works much better. First, thanks to auto-spell checkers I can see my errors *as they happen*. That sort of immediate feedback is great. Beyond that, I can fix it easily....backspace, hit a key or two and bam, we're good. Nobody knows that I screwed it up and it's an insignificant amount of work.
Grammar...well that's another thing completely. I really feel like a lot of the grammatical rules are outdated by technology. When was the last time you saw someone indent a paragraph on the internet? And the whole punctuation inside a quote. Bah.
Bottom line is, if a reasonable person can read and understand what you've written - mission accomplished. That's success.
Old people write out words in perfect script, and see if they "look right". Youngsters type them in, and look for a red squiggly line underneath.
...my conventional keyboard/mouse arrangement had been stabbing my wrist for years, and the near-instant relief from that pain leaves me feeling more charitable.
My cursive has gone to crap. Well, crappier crap. I've always been a typing guy. Cursive and me are archenemies. Not even frenemies, just all-out hate each other.
A few years of early 20s partying too much, not sleeping enough and I saw my spelling skills go downhill a bit ... picked up books and started reading again, problem solved.
I am, therefore you think.
.. and don't even get started on how bad my pictograms are...
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.
My handwriting has never been that great, and I print 100% of the time to this day, so I've never been really encouraged to improve it. Typing everything ends up being an enabler for poor handwriting.
For spelling, being reminded by the red squiggly line that it thinks I've misspelled something makes me take instant action to find the correct spelling--something paper and pen cannot do. Otherwise, I find my spelling no different when written vs typed. My spelling has always been pretty good.
-m
http://www.invisik.com
Has this ever happened to you?
You work very horde on a paper for English clash
And then get a very glow raid (like a D or even a D=)
and all because you are the word's liverwurst spoiler.
Proofreading your peppers is a matter of the the utmost impotence.
This is a problem that affects manly, manly students.
I myself was such a bed spiller once upon a term
that my English teacher in my sophomoric year,
Mrs. Myth, said I would never get into a good colleague.
And that's all I wanted, just to get into a good colleague.
Not just anal community colleague,
because I wouldn't be happy at anal community colleague.
I needed a place that would offer me intellectual simulation,
I really need to be challenged, challenged dentally.
I know this makes me sound like a stereo,
but I really wanted to go to an ivory legal collegue.
So I needed to improvement
or gone would be my dream of going to Harvard, Jail, or Prison
(in Prison, New Jersey).
So I got myself a spell checker
and figured I was on Sleazy Street.
But there are several missed aches
that a spell chukker can't can't catch catch.
For instant, if you accidentally leave a word
your spell exchequer won't put it in you.
And God for billing purposes only
you should have serial problems with Tori Spelling
your spell Chekhov might replace a word
with one you had absolutely no detention of using.
Because what do you want it to douch?
It only does what you tell it to douche.
You're the one with your hand on the mouth going clit, clit, clit.
It just goes to show you how embargo
one careless clit of the mouth can be.
Which reminds me of this one time during my Junior Mint.
The teacher read my entire paper on A Sale of Two Titties
out loud to all of my assmates.
I'm not joking, I'm totally cereal.
It was the most humidifying experience of my life,
being laughed at pubically.
So do yourself a flavor and follow these two Pisces of advice:
One: There is no prostitute for careful editing.
And three: When it comes to proofreading,
the red penis your friend.
Taylor Mali is a genius.
I'm younger than you, and I spent most of my adolescent life with the keyboard (Fidonet - age clue :) as my primary mode of communication, more so even than speech, so I would expect to show the same symptoms to a larger extent, ceteris paribus.
However, I have no problem with either spelling or grammar [not to say I never break the rules of grammar, though], and my first act when installing a word processor is generally to disable the automatic spelling and grammar correction. (I also use a lot of technical words in everyday writing, and things like variable names that not infrequently start with two capital letters, so automatic spellchecking/case-correction software is a big annoyance to me).
OP, I would hazard a guess that you don't read as much printed literature as you once did, and that is part of the reason why your MAD L33T SKILLZ are atrophying. It's not just the lack of pen-to-paper work, but also a lack of the other things you also used to do in the Age of Ink. Additionally, prominent content-generating people around you (newspaper reporters, for instance) are atrophying as well as the language homogenizes and words die, so the bar is constantly being lowered.
I keep myself in mental shape by reading real books (sometimes electronically, I must say, but by real books I mean not saccharine, anti-intellectual content that was developed specifically for the Internet generation - I prefer English, American and French literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth century). I also keep a couple of manual typewriters in working order, and use them to write correspondence to politicians and keep my memoirs. When I write (in my engineering notebooks or the pocket notebook I carry with me) it's with a nice fountain pen that gives pleasure in the act of laying ink on the page. All of those things, and others I've forgotten to mention, help to keep your language skills in shape.
Note that using a manual typewriter also keeps your typing accuracy up, as there's no invisible way to fix a typographical error made with an impact printing technology :)
The solution is obviously just to write more. I don't write because I have anything to say, I actually just like the physical sensation of putting pen to paper. I like seeing the letters that I leave behind, and I've learned to enjoy my handwriting and make it aesthetic, at least to my own eye. I prefer blank, unlined pages, and a nice gel-ink pen. I've got a leather bound notebook, and while I have nothing at all as interesting to put in it as the great scientists and inventors of years past, I feel like there's a small connection there.
I've never had a problem with spelling, regardless of the medium. Spelling (and reading) were valued extremely highly in my household when I was growing up. My Dad would point out spelling errors in published works with great amusement, and he usually had 2 or 3 books on the go, as well as a magazine and the daily newspaper. In other words, it was an environment of attention to detail with regards to written words.
I've got a lot of muscle memory when it comes to typing; I switched to dvorak about 10 years ago. Looking at the keyboard makes things much harder, so I rely on my muscle memory to get me through the day. In the end, you have to think about the words that you're typing as you type them. It sounds to me like you may be focussed on things at a higher level, ie., the sentence. Slow down a bit and I'm sure it'll come back to you.
My spelling has been aided by the constant auto correction features of my PC. But my hand writing has gotten even worse than it ever was. When one doesn't need to write by hand the ability declines quite a bit.
I learned to type and spell during the same formative years. At spelling bees, when I wasn't too nervous to think straight, I would type out words in the air while I thought, much the same way other people said they pretended to write them out in the air.
As long as you can go back and mime it, what does it matter if you think of typing first instead of longhand?
anyways, learning a foriegn language is far more detrimental to spelling.
I'm a reasonably fast and accurate typist, but I can still write acceptably in cursive and regular print. I have a tendency to use notebooks (the kind made out of dead trees) to scratch down ideas and brainstorm, which is all the practice I really need to keep functional.
I don't frankly care one way or the other whether people can type or write well. People who obsess over the decline of handwriting are generally pretentious wankers, who are probably also obsessing over the fact that no one wants to read Ulysses anymore either.
But I think the reason people tend to make tons of spelling errors and have slop handwriting is because they don't bother to work at it. Even when I'm typing, I'll go back and fix typo's and correct words if I notice one is spelled incorrectly.
It's not because I'm anal. It's because I'm bothering to write this shit down! This is ten minutes of my fucking life here! There will be a day when I'd happily kill a fucking puppy for 10 more minutes, and I'll think back and think, "Well I sure wasted a fucking ton of time on Slashdot, but at least I didn't look like an illiterate 12 year old girl!"
The same is true of my handwriting. It's legible, it's got personality. I try not to misspell words. It's because I don't want some superficial prick to dismiss everything I've bothered to write down because it's straggly and shaky, and looks like something a kid wrote. I want them to look at it and say, "Jesus, not only is he brilliant and sexy, his handwriting is fucking exceptional! It's not straggly or shaky, it's legible, and it's got personality! If he spent that much time on his handwriting he must speak 12 languages, and play an instrument too!"
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Not true. As a child I read more books by far than anyone in my class, but I was never a particularly good speller.
What I noticed (after I starting chatting/foruming online) was that I lost some of my previous ability to use the correct form of their/there/their, read/reed, write/right, hair/hare, etc. I have noticed others losing it as well. It doesn't happen all the time, but more than one would expect (i.e. never) for the average college grad. This seems to defy logic as you can see what you are typing and should be able to distinguish the correct word to use. Maybe it is because we rush to type online chat/forum posts...
I come here for the love
Not in the least bit true. My wife is a prolific reader (a novel every couple of days since she was a child) and her spelling is awful. She has particular difficulty with double letters and apostrophes.
Its just another analogue skill replaced in a digital age.
Noticing the same spelling mistake over and over causes me to eventually learn the correct spelling of the word rather than continue to spell incorrectly. Hand-writing notes in class would leave me with an incorrect spelling which I would later study and incorporate. However, when I type my in-class notes and have spell-check, I find that my spelling is corrected for the most part with a simple right click and I slowly realize which words I really didn't know how to spell.
Between inline spellcheckers and T9 input on my phone, I actually find my spelling improving.
An inline spell checker will tell you every time, patiently you've spelled a word wrong (as long as you don't have one that auto-corrects you), so the repetition teaches effectively. With T9, it's actually easier at times to spell out the whole word instead of trying to hack it to spell out the short hand phrases that used to be most efficient.
While you do have a point here, I have never been able to bring myself to degenerate my typing for an extended period of time without affecting my "proper for work" style. Using shorthand made me waste time during classes and tests because I had to check several times, having gotten used to misspell words to go faster   which, paradoxically, made me go more slowly.
"The body may heal, but the mind is not always so resilient." -- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
My handwriting was never that great. I taught myself to write rather than waiting to go to school, and though it got improved it was never that good. While I was at school they changed from teaching cursive script to a different script, which was more legible, but it would've been nice to have had some consistency. When I learned to touch type at about age 19 or 20 my handwriting deteriorated markedly. These days I'm hopeless ... I still know how words are spelled, but actually writing them down is a different matter. My handwriting is full of crossed out words and inserted or mangled letters.
Almost everything I write is done with a keyboard - writing anything by hand is rare for me.
Incidentally, I was amazed a few years ago to get an email from a 3-year old niece. She could type because she could recognise the letters on the keyboard. Her spelling wasn't great but it was OK. But she hadn't yet learned how to actually make the letter shapes herself.
FYI. http://bash.org/?367896 ... :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have no doubt that, if the submitter has observed a decline in the accuracy of his spelling, then that observation is correct. However, the conclusions he draws from it are... weird. I'm nearly as old as the submitter implies of himself, and I gave up cursive handwriting in eighth grade, long before I ever encountered a computer keyboard. I've been using keyboards daily since 1979. While it's true that I can't write CURSIVE worth a damn - I've forgotten the "flow" and how to form the letters - my actual ability to spell isn't affected one bit by either that or my use of keyboards. It is certainly true that some poorly designed keyboards (like the one I'm using now, sadly) actually encourage TYPING mistakes, those mistakes certainly don't carry over into another medium, and there's no reason to think they would.
What are we talking about here... linguistic laziness? Place the blame where it belongs, because it doesn't belong with a keyboard.
I'm a readaholic who was trained to avoid spelling errors because they would affect my grades. Of course, there are a few words I mess up on a consistent basis.
I think that I make more typing errors than spelling errors, so having spell check allows me to catch them before they go out. So the 'new' tech is useful.
It can also be annoying if your spell check can't handle words like 'readaholic'.
I don't know about you, but when I read I never look at the full word. I read a ton in my youth and now I read news and textbooks all day, and I can tell you that it hasn't helped my spelling at all....at least I don't think it has.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Amen. When I was in elementary school, I don't think I ever passed a spelling test. Sometime around the eighth-grade I discovered the joys of books. Fast forward a couple of years, and I was the person other people asked to spell words. Spelling and grammar, in my opinion, are a matter of pattern recognition. The more you are exposed to certain words and patterns of speech the easier it is to replicate it when writing. For example, I can spell the word "nebulous" because a certain author was in love with this word, so I must have read it hundreds of times.
When you start a fire, be to windward of it. Do not attack from the leeward. -- Sun Tzu
I can confirm this. I'm excellent at spelling, and have never learned it by rote. Instead, I read lots of literature from a young age. Typing is my weakness, as I also learned that at a young age by experimenting and programming, rather than being taught proper technique. So it's always my fingers getting in the way of my brain, not the other way around, as so many excellent typists, but poor spellers, here on slashdot are attesting to.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Do you foresee a time when you won't be able to type into correctable word-processors? WIll you ever be in a spelling bee? Do you think society will technologically fail and we will be required to write out all our communication? If after typing something, do you lack(due to some condition or accident) the basic cognitive ability to see whether it is correct or incorrect, something that is harder to lose than rote-memory spelling knowledge? If your answer was yes to any of those questions, then you have a problem. Otherwise, its not something to worry about.
I know a lot of people constantly griping about how kids today can't write in cursive; it doesn't matter. Largely, spelling doesn't matter either - in fact, for most of written history, spelling "correctly" wasn't a big deal. Just ask Shakespeare. Can you communicate? Then congratulations!
I used to text with mostly full words (predictive), with a few exceptions (eg. 2 for to, too and two); now the same holds true for emailing from my phone. But my main amount of electronic writing is in typing online: forum comments, etc. This means that I am writing in full sentences, continuing to exercise all of my grammar and spelling skills. When it comes to writing with a pen, which I do every day (I have kept a diary since I was 16), I haven't noticed a decline in my grammar or spelling at all. I guess with automatic spellcheckers and such people can be inculcated to rely on automatic correction or mistakes highlighted for them; as of now, I haven't been affected by this, and I can't see myself slipping anytime soon. If anything, my writing skills improve year by year: including the the ways in which I express myself. It's important to note that perfect, essay-style grammar is not the be all and end all of communication. So long as you express what you wish to say: with the variations in the ways that people express themselves through various media, then a slip here and there isn't going to cause you to lose your ability to communicate. ;)
My handwriting is poor and slow and well below my academic level, as a child it left me frustrated and sad and hampered my ability to complete assignments in school.
The computer has been my liberation, I enjoy writing with a computer in a way I could never do longhand.
Spelling hasn't declined because of the computer, spelling has declined because teachers don't enforce it anymore.
Spelling, grammar and handwriting are three different topics. My handwriting has always been lousy, but that has nothing to do with grammar or spelling.
I was in the top 10 in my schools spelling bee, but I got a D on my grammar tests.
So should you Mr AC because you don't know how to use ellipses properly.
I don't think my written spelling has deteriorated; however, my typed spelling has. Specifically, I make a lot of homophone errors when typing, which I didn't use to. The interesting thing is that while my production has deteriorated, my recognition has not, so I still notice when I make errors -- but only after I've typed out the word. With something like their/there/they're, I can even type the wrong one, recognize the error, type the other wrong one, and only then get it right.
We rarely wee hand written notes. We tend to always type out what ever notes we want to make. Class rooms have people taking their notes on laptops. The result is our handwriting becoming shodier with lots of gramatical mistakes. In an era where we type out everything, handwritten notes have become rare commodity. In fact one of my posts on Edunetsys.com I have emphasized that at least we must make sincere efforts to write half a pege daily.
I couldn't get into word processing fast enough!
When my first computer, (an Apple II) came on line, I was suddenly able to write things which didn't read like the result of mild brain damage. (Now, now. Settle down.) --So long, that is, as my notes didn't go over 10 pages or so, which would fill up the memory and choke the system.
--The ability to edit a page in a non-linear fashion, inserting words and sentences, re-arranging thoughts, all of that made it feel as though I were lifting myself out of the drudgery of a 2D world to step into a 3D world! It was amazing, and I can only suppose that it is due to the vastly superior brains of other writers working in ye olden times that anything worth reading was even possible. --Either that or the whole phenomenon of second, third and (shudder) fourth drafts written in long-hand. Good lord! And they bled people to reduce fever, too.
For my part, I accept my linguistic limitations and I've never looked back. --And if I did, I doubt I'd be able to make heads or tails of my own gawdawful chicken scratch notes.
-FL
When I type too fast on the internet I make phonetic (so do I call them) mistakes like:
"I can sea you", instead of "I can see you"
"I right a letter" instead of "I write a letter"
etc.
Another problem is that my hands type blindly and follow paths of other words than the ones I wanted to write:
I wanted to write "I have computed the values" and I write "I have computer the values" for example.
Those two strange problems occure after several years of writting on the keyboard that it goes too fast and my hands are like self living.
I hate it when I later read some of my submitted texts and find such stupid mistakes :P
The "H-Word" has died for me.
Spelling is a skill that comes from READING, not from writing. If one continues to read regularly, one finds that a word "looks" wrong if misspelled. In fact, there are words that I really don't know how to spell, in the sense that I couldn't get them right in a spelling bee, but when I write them (incorrectly) I find I can tell by sight that they are wrongly spelled and correct them. Once is a while this takes two tries, but when it's right, I can tell.
lie not within our typing, but our age.
"My handwriting abilities have deteriorated over the years."
and
"(I'm used to Telex machines, which should give you an indication of how old I am.)"
And you need a hint? Of course some of us are experiencing this. It's called "old". Say hello to entropy.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I find that all the little red lines have helped my spelling over the years. Being badly dyslexic I always struggled in school and university, though in resent years I have found by spelling and grammar has greatly improved, though its an active effort to spell words correctly and not just right click when I do get them wrong.
"You are still innocent until proven guilty. What's changed is what they do to innocent people." by notnAP (846325)
and if you're used to Telex machines, perhaps you're actually just suffering from dementia ?
In India (south), even in last century, people used to write into palm leaves with a needle. I can not do that now, and I don't care. you will forget to type in couple of decades, when mind-computer interfaces become commonplace. Will you worry about your typing then ?
No!!
However it is reducing my hand writing ability.
I find that when I do attempt to write stuff by hand, it is so slow that my brain skips ahead, and I start spelling out the next word before I have written the last one, hence words get mangled.
However, since I can touch type quickly and accurately, I have enough time to use full, proper English sentences and go back and actually proofread to ensure I made no mistakes*.
I feel that the use of a keyboard has actually made me a more effective communicator with regard to spelling, punctuation and grammar, provided that I have access to a keyboard.
If I ever find myself in a situation with no keyboard available, then spelling is probably not a big priority anyway.
*and no doubt Muphry's law guarantees that I make a mistake in this post.
My handwriting is sloppy as well; I can hardly read it myself. Good job seeing that typo! I miss the old keyboard I had on my IBM XT, when you didn't press a letter hard enough you knew it. I suspect that's where some people's habits of saying "noone" and "alot" came from; they saw other peoples' typos on the internet, and assumed they were legitimate rather than typos.
Free Martian Whores!
I not only don't see the full word, in a well written tome I don't see any words at all. My brain somehow translates the words into actions, figures, etc. without ever noticing that I'm reading. I don't see the words "he fell screaming to his death", I actually see the man falling and screaming and splattering on the ground with a sickening thud.
Because of that I simply can't read Stephen King; he's too good a writer and his stuff just freaks me out too much.
Free Martian Whores!
I've found myself swapping in older mental device drivers when going back to cursive from typing. It may not slow me down all that much, but there's definite higher neural CPU load as the bitrotted processes are parity-matched and extrapolated on the fly.
Having to write less has definitely made my handwriting worse, but typing has greatly improved my spelling ability because the letters are easier to visualize, particularly in color. I'd be interested to hear if anyone else with some form Synesthesia agrees.
They're impossible to use consistently these days, because hitting tab when typing in a text entry box in a browser usually switches cursor focus to the "Post" or "Submit" button. Why hasn't the useless caps-lock key been turned into the "switch cursor focus" button, with the Tab key working like it's supposed to in text processing?
Other than that, I'm actually pretty satisfied with my grammar/spelling - the only problem is that living in Germany is slowly ruining the English I managed to learn between Kindergarten and 10th grade...
I knew handwritting, grammar and spelling stopped mattering the day my son's 7th grade teacher told me not to worry about his chicken scratch they used laptops.
Computers are also ruining people's ability to draw. First of all 2D CAD removed any manual drafting skills and now rather than reaching for paper and pencil for a quick sketch people waste hours on some 3D modeller. Even diagramming is becoming the domain of the computer. Is it really quicker to do that quick flow chart on a computer than to doodle it out by hand? Is it really so much better? I still believe that all engineers and technicians should be taught the basis of sketching.