I used to pride myself on my spelling, grammar, and overall grasp of the English language. Years of longhand essay writing at school and university for hawkeyed professors made me extremely wary of losing any points to simple spelling errors. I couldn’t afford it back then, my grades were at stake. When I entered the corporate world, the whole ballgame changed.
It started at first with misspelling words like conceive or receive. It was so easy, Microsoft would just fix it for me immediately, without even asking for my permission or advice. Genius.
Then it got more serious; I started to forget to capitalize. Well maybe not forget, per se, but more like purposely not make the extra effort to extend my pinky finger to the shift key in order to capitalize. And why should I? Spellcheck did it for me automatically and saved me from increasing my chances of an early onset of arthritis in at least one of my fingers.
I got lazy. Real lazy.
But the problem never struck me until I had to write an email in a browser that was not blessed with the brilliance of spellcheck. No squiggly red lines to alert me of my mistakes, no green flashing in my face to tell me when I was being grammatically incorrect. I found myself questioning everything, even the spelling of the most basic of words. Did I really have to capitalize on my own now? How could this be?
Strangely enough as my frustration with this backwards interface grew, so did my clarity. Has everything just become too easy for us? Online banking, home delivery, anything you want right at your fingertips or at your doorstep. No need to do your own chores, or to correct your own mistakes. All the options to veer us back in the right direction are presented to us on a platter by spellcheck. Suggestions on how to make things right again. It’s no wonder that’s what we begin to expect in real life.
Too much effort has become the number one deal breaker in today’s world, relationships included. Investing time and thought into something seems so unnecessary, inconvenient even. Why won’t relationships just fix themselves? It has become that we almost expect that someone will magically present us with an array of politically correct things to say when fights erupt. If it’s not easy, we don’t want it.
And yet we wonder why things never seem to work out. We scratch our heads and think, “what could have possibly gone wrong this time?” But it only takes one incident to give you that answer in plain black and white. That one email written incorrectly in a browser that just does not want to help you out, or the relationship lost because you were just too stubborn to think it was you who should exert the energy. You begin to stop seeking the aid of spellcheck, and begin to rely more on yourself and even give more of yourself.
And so my resolution to try harder is born. I can’t say that at times I won’t still cheat. I admit that it will be difficult to resist the temptation of using the thesaurus to avoid racking my brains for a better word when urgent reports are due, but in real life I will try harder, and maybe next time it’ll work out. Maybe.
On a final note, the word “spellcheck” is marked as incorrect in Microsoft Word. Go figure.
It started at first with misspelling words like conceive or receive. It was so easy, Microsoft would just fix it for me immediately, without even asking for my permission or advice. Genius.
Then it got more serious; I started to forget to capitalize. Well maybe not forget, per se, but more like purposely not make the extra effort to extend my pinky finger to the shift key in order to capitalize. And why should I? Spellcheck did it for me automatically and saved me from increasing my chances of an early onset of arthritis in at least one of my fingers.
I got lazy. Real lazy.
But the problem never struck me until I had to write an email in a browser that was not blessed with the brilliance of spellcheck. No squiggly red lines to alert me of my mistakes, no green flashing in my face to tell me when I was being grammatically incorrect. I found myself questioning everything, even the spelling of the most basic of words. Did I really have to capitalize on my own now? How could this be?
Strangely enough as my frustration with this backwards interface grew, so did my clarity. Has everything just become too easy for us? Online banking, home delivery, anything you want right at your fingertips or at your doorstep. No need to do your own chores, or to correct your own mistakes. All the options to veer us back in the right direction are presented to us on a platter by spellcheck. Suggestions on how to make things right again. It’s no wonder that’s what we begin to expect in real life.
Too much effort has become the number one deal breaker in today’s world, relationships included. Investing time and thought into something seems so unnecessary, inconvenient even. Why won’t relationships just fix themselves? It has become that we almost expect that someone will magically present us with an array of politically correct things to say when fights erupt. If it’s not easy, we don’t want it.
And yet we wonder why things never seem to work out. We scratch our heads and think, “what could have possibly gone wrong this time?” But it only takes one incident to give you that answer in plain black and white. That one email written incorrectly in a browser that just does not want to help you out, or the relationship lost because you were just too stubborn to think it was you who should exert the energy. You begin to stop seeking the aid of spellcheck, and begin to rely more on yourself and even give more of yourself.
And so my resolution to try harder is born. I can’t say that at times I won’t still cheat. I admit that it will be difficult to resist the temptation of using the thesaurus to avoid racking my brains for a better word when urgent reports are due, but in real life I will try harder, and maybe next time it’ll work out. Maybe.
On a final note, the word “spellcheck” is marked as incorrect in Microsoft Word. Go figure.
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