Spring Break
OP-ED: A generation lazy and spellbound by spell checkers
by Brooke Linden
Forum | 3/14/06
Posted online at 12:07 AM EST on 3/14/06
"I'm spelling so bad," a student murmured in my fiction class last week, as we were filling out mid-term professor evaluations. "This reflects so badly," she said.
"Next week we'll have a spelling test," another student joked. These words came from Brandeis students sitting in a class meant to train them to be good writers. However, the fact that they could not confidently hand-write a mundane teacher evaluation does not call into question their ability to be good writers. In this generation, spelling has become a matter of simply clicking the "spell-check" button. The secret that many students are not good spellers is revealed by in-class essays and weak moments when students forget to automatically spell-check their work.
Something remarkable has happened to our culture of spelling. In elementary school, we spent so much time studying our weekly words for Friday's tests and our teachers promised we would never forget how to spell them. The aim was to be master spellers by high school. But while many students wrote their first essays in elementary school by hand, lots of people today do not even keep hand-written journals. The only thing people need to do today in order to spell well is to find the underlined words on their computer document.
Like any skill, if the ability to spell is not used, it will be lost. Our generation grew up alongside the growth of home computers, and today's dependence on word processing programs, especially the magical "auto correct" option most word processors come with, has caused our generation to unlearn how to spell.
It is important to engage actively in tasks if you want to remember how to do them. The difference between pressing "spell check" and struggling to find the word in the dictionary before copying it down is the same difference between skimming a textbook once through and taking careful notes on the reading. In both cases, students in the first scenario learn more in the long run.
When spell-checking a word electronically, I base my choice of the correct spelling on word recognition; this method does not teach me how to spell the word. I spend so little effort in trying to correct my mistake that I have even forgotten what the misspelled word was. On the contrary, there is no Spanish spell checker on my computer, so that when writing in Spanish, I have to look up the spelling the annoying, traditional way. After one or two times of looking up the word and recreating it through physically typing it myself, I do not make the same mistake again.
"Next week we'll have a spelling test," another student joked. These words came from Brandeis students sitting in a class meant to train them to be good writers. However, the fact that they could not confidently hand-write a mundane teacher evaluation does not call into question their ability to be good writers. In this generation, spelling has become a matter of simply clicking the "spell-check" button. The secret that many students are not good spellers is revealed by in-class essays and weak moments when students forget to automatically spell-check their work.
Something remarkable has happened to our culture of spelling. In elementary school, we spent so much time studying our weekly words for Friday's tests and our teachers promised we would never forget how to spell them. The aim was to be master spellers by high school. But while many students wrote their first essays in elementary school by hand, lots of people today do not even keep hand-written journals. The only thing people need to do today in order to spell well is to find the underlined words on their computer document.
Like any skill, if the ability to spell is not used, it will be lost. Our generation grew up alongside the growth of home computers, and today's dependence on word processing programs, especially the magical "auto correct" option most word processors come with, has caused our generation to unlearn how to spell.
It is important to engage actively in tasks if you want to remember how to do them. The difference between pressing "spell check" and struggling to find the word in the dictionary before copying it down is the same difference between skimming a textbook once through and taking careful notes on the reading. In both cases, students in the first scenario learn more in the long run.
When spell-checking a word electronically, I base my choice of the correct spelling on word recognition; this method does not teach me how to spell the word. I spend so little effort in trying to correct my mistake that I have even forgotten what the misspelled word was. On the contrary, there is no Spanish spell checker on my computer, so that when writing in Spanish, I have to look up the spelling the annoying, traditional way. After one or two times of looking up the word and recreating it through physically typing it myself, I do not make the same mistake again.