I’m a pretty good/fast (4-6 finger) typist, and post here almost exclusively from my computer. I am a pretty good speller. While my fingers occasionally fumble, I don’t think my errors result in nearly as many misspellings as spellcheck does by “correcting” unusual words I know I intentionally spelt correctly. (Most recently, “Flat and Scruggs” incorrected to “Flat and Scruggs.”)
I’m not sure why I have not yet gone through the effort of turning spellcheck off.
I find it somewhat more helpful when texting from my phone - in terms of allowing me to not type out every word. But still find it frustrating when I type a word correctly and forget to click on the word below in quotes to specify that - yes - I DO want to say what I typed.
I turn autocorrect off precisely because I’ll never know what it is doing to me. In fact it seems to have screwed up your reference to correcting “Flatt and Scruggs” without you noticing it had done so. But I do leave the spell-check enabled, so I can see how many words I’ve typoed or it is confused about. And leave it for me to decide which and how to correct each.
I just slammed out the previous paragraph with no heed to my typing. I observe now that spell-check has highlighted 6 true typos and one word recognition error where it wants to change a good word to an incorrect word. And that in a paragraph with zero jargon, acronyms, coinages, etc.
I also find that for many of my typos, spell-check’s preferred word is not the one I want. Instead it’s the 2nd or 3rd replacement word on offer. Each of those represents an “incorrection” had I left the auto-spell-change feature turned on.
Spell check is fine, where “spell check” is putting a red line under words it thinks I may have gotten wrong. Helps all the time for typos or spelling errors.
Autocorrect, I only use on my phone/tablet because I’m less comfortable using the swipe keyboard than a real keyboard so my words would probably be a hot mess without it. It is annoying when it guesses completely wrong but, on balance, it makes my life easier.
I like spellcheck just fine on my desktop computer. On my computer it doesn’t try to automatically change the word, it gives the word a red underline (depending on the app, but that’s usually how it works, for example if I’m typing a SDMB reply). then I can right-click to see a suggested change.
On my phone, it can be maddening-- spellcheck sometimes changes words I not only intended but spelled correctly, because it assumes a different word should go there. In older iOS versions, a suggested different word would pop up while I was typing the word-- if I wanted to keep the word I could tap on the pop-up; otherwise if I kept typing the word would be automatically changed for me. Then after some system update the word would change no matter whether I tapped the pop-up or not. The only way I could figure out how to keep the word was to back-space and retype 2 or 3 times until stupid spellcheck got the idea
But I tried turning off spellcheck on my phone once, and my texts looked like I was having a stroke, so it is the (slightly) lesser of two evils.
Either it’s smarter than you think or I’m missing something.
[ETA, I hadn’t read @LSLGuy’s post and forgot how Lester’s name was spelled.]
To answer your OP, I do most of my posting here and a lot of my other typing on my tablet, and there the autocorrect is essential. When typing on a real computer keyboard it’s not so useful.
I also use spell check but not auto correct. I’m working on an sf book, and with alien names and my own tech, auto correct would be a disaster. I wind up adding lots of stuff to the dictionary when going through the edit check.
I type as I speak–idiosyncratically. Auto-anything does not speak for me and spellcheck and autocorrect are turned off the first time I use a new phone or app. Because I ain’t got time to esplain to the ducking phone that it’s always gonna be “fucking” unless it’s “fuckin’” or some other variant. Technology can lick my taint!
Wow - I’m even more clueless than I thought! Yeah, I meant autocorrect. have a pretty large vocabulary in most things, but in matters tech, I regularly use incorrect terms.
Spellcheck is a fine thing. Let me see if I can igure how to turn off autocorrect…
I have never used auto-correct and would not. But I appreciate spell check. The one regret I have about the text editor I have been using for nearly 40 is that there is no integrated spell-checker. I used to have a wonderful stand-alone spell-checker but it was a 16 bit program and Windows no longer runs it.
Autocorrect is a hell no for me, and I always turn it off ASAP on any device it’s on, ever since I first encountered it years ago and got frustrated at it changing what I deliberately meant to type. I’d rather make my own mistakes than have some dumbass electronics make them for me.
Spellcheck, with the red line, is okay but fallible—occasionally useful, but I can get along fine without it.
Spell check has probably made me a worse speller. I donno. But I have always been bad. There are some words that I can’t seem to store in my brain, and I expect to spell them incorrectly.
I read a lot, but the spelling of some common words elude me. Again, and again and again.
Since Spell check will come to the rescue, I don’t worry about it. I have bigger fish to fry.
Keyboards and computers in general has turned my handwriting to shit though. That sucks, but again, I can deal with it.
Not spelling, but my Mac email program, if I add an extra space as I sometimes do to make columns of numbers line up in rows of text, decides I missed adding a period and even when I backspace and delete the added period, re-adds it, 2-3 times, before realizing what I want.
And if I inadvertently type a period when I meant a comma, it automatically capitalizes the next letter, but leaves it capitalized when I backspace and fix the comma.
Damn - I thought I had turned off autocorrect, but I was just sending a private message here and it changed hrgs to hogs and hugs, and clmts to clots. Almost makes you feel you are going insane when - as in this thread - I’m looking at my fingers and intentionally pounding out h-r-g-s, only to glance up and see the screen shows “hugs.”
Autocorrect drives me up the wall. Mine has somehow decided that every time I type the word “the” it should be corrected to TBE. I can’t get it to stop. I’ve tried deleting TBE from my dictionary. I’ve tried resetting the dictionary. I’ve tried turning autocorrect off and on again. Nothing works.
Add me to those who nix autocorrect in every device and application if I can.
Spellcheck? Yes, I am fallible, go ahead and underline so I look and make sure that’s what I wanted.
But autocorrect? It only makes me waste time going back to rewrite until I can convince the system that yes, that there IS what I meant to type, stop replacing it with nonsense, don’t make me go butlerian on your chips.
It does seem to be easier to catch autocorrect fails, but I sometimes still get caught. I told my husband that I would be leaving, “as soon as I get Ryan”. Not sure why Ryan got chosen over ready, which would have made a lot more sense.
I do appreciate autocomplete, as switching keyboards from U.S. to German can be time consuming. Some of the German town names near here are really long, so they are annoying to type.
I ignore the red line. I have no idea what Chrome currently thinks is correct, because most of this post has underlines, but not all of it.
Fortunately my typing and proofreading skills are fairly good.
And now that I have written that, there’s probably at least one mistake in this post. C’est la vie.
