My handwriting was mediocre to begin with, but it’s gone to shit over the past 20-25 years now that I type a hell of a lot more than I write. (Actually, my handwriting was in the crapper by the beginning of the new millennium, and has stayed there since. :)) But the point is, my handwriting is crappy because its quality is way less important than it once was.
My spelling, OTOH, has always been excellent, and the little red lines have helped me catch the few misspellings I was prone to make of words that I used only rarely.
But while all this typing made my handwriting go to shit, the quality of my writing has gotten so much better. I was a pretty mediocre writer 25 years ago, because my handwriting couldn’t remotely come close to keeping up with my thoughts. With the speed of typing on a computer keyboard, and the ease of correcting and editing in a WYSIWYG environment, my fingers can more or less keep up. I’ve gotten way better both at getting my ideas down, and expressing them succinctly and in an organized manner. (My supervisors over the past 12-15 years have gone out of their way to emphasize the clarity of my writing as one of my strengths, so this isn’t just my personal assessment.)
I have a theory about this. One thing that spellcheckers cannot distinguish is correct usage of homophones. So, they’re, there, and their might be spelled correctly, but that doesn’t mean you used the correct word.
I blame the teaching of Whole Language Reading. Now, I know a lot of people hate the Phonics method but I think it helps tremendously with spelling in general because you learn that certain combinations of letters create certain sounds. It would not help with homophones though, and I think that’s where the confusion lies.
I was taught to read by Phonics so I’m not totally sure how WLR works, but I know my sister and I could not help her kids with learning to read because we’d say, “Well, just sound it out” and they had no idea what the hell we were talking about. It seems you just stare at words until they make sense to you? I dunno; it doesn’t make sense to me. But I’ve noticed that people who learned to read by WLR seem to be worse spellers than Phonics people. I’m no educator, just a WAG.
I suspect that was a nifty strategy by **Shagnasty **to avoid the wrath of Gaudere’s law (it’s a thread about spelling, after all): build in some obvious deliberate errors for all to see to hide the ones that happen inevitably anyway.
Spellcheck and GPS have dumbed people down, definitely. Since they no longer must engage mentally in these activities, that part of their brain becomes atrophied.
2 problems --if you’re not sure of spelling, spellcheck only gives you options, not necessarily correct one; 2 spellcheck will not catch wrong word ie 'complement" vs “compliment” Unfortunately, even professional journalists are guilty of this
Most writing that got published used to be checked and corrected by editors who knew their stuff. Whether the author also did was a lot less of an issue. I expect there have always been people who could tell a story just fine but couldn’t spell.
Between the fact that a lot of writing is now self-published (especially online) and the fact that most newspapers now can’t any longer afford human editors and need to settle for the cheaper computer version, there is now a whole lot of writing around that has effectively not been edited.
“Generations past” is a rather wide net. In many places, say within the last couple hundred years, most people wrote letters quite frequently, as it was the only way to keep in touch with friends or family who lived outside shouting distance, and also the only way to conduct any business with anyone at a distance.
Beyond the limit of their intellect?! There are plenty of intelligent people who can’t spell in English; and quite a number of them who, while otherwise intelligent, don’t want to be bothered with grammar beyond the point of making themselves basically comprehensible.
Spelling in English is a talent. It requires a certain sort of visual memory, because there’s no overall logic to it whatsoever. I happen to have that talent: I’m useless at recognizing faces, but I’m great at recognizing words. That doesn’t mean I’m any smarter, or any stupider, than somebody who’s great at recognizing faces and terrible at recognizing words.
I always turn off spellcheck; it drives me crazy underlining names and underlining correct but unusual words. If I want to be entirely sure of something, I’ll run spellcheck on it after I’m done.
As far as handwriting goes, I think that’s a matter of practice, and getting out of practice at it means getting worse at it. My own handwriting was never fantastic, but it’s much worse than it used to be, and I think that’s because nowadays I type most of what I write.
most schools quit using cursive back in the 90s I remember a class being told not to use cursive cause she couldn’t read it anyways and she didn’t wanna guess
I find the mobile spell check aggressively obnoxious … I do like Grammarly which i started using recently…
but as someone who used to be able to spell but not write all the new ways are helpful
trying to use more than 2 fingers to type makes it unreadable spelling wise
now I just wish the grammar check part wasn’t 20 or more a month
Just want to mention that FtGKid2 is a professional copy editor. Works for an online business. People submit their documents, they get farmed out to the editors. FtGKid2 is a senior editor so gets first pick of a batch as well as deciding which junior editor gets what. Works “Eastern time” since that’s where most of the business comes from. Lots of academics (students and faculty) so end of terms are busy and summers are dull. But also many business documents.
Of course the kid gets overly excited about the usual things like “less” vs. “fewer” and “more unique”.
The reports of copy editing’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
Neil Armstrong is unique because he was the first man to walk on the moon. I am unique because I am the only person located in the room I am. On the basis of those facts, Neil Armstrong is more unique than I am, because other people might be unique for precisely the same reason as me because the reference “the room they are in” can change. Similarly, once someone becomes the first person to walk on Mars, Neil Armstrong will become less unique.
My spelling is still pretty darned good (yes, I am anal about bad spelling) but my handwriting has gone completely down the shitter. Some days I can barely write my own signature!
Did you know just about all phonics programs integrate whole language, and just about all whole language programs integrate phonics? The two have never been mutually exclusive, except in ideologically driven public discourse, usually generated by politicians. You’d be hard-pressed to find any teacher that does only one or the other. Also: letters don’t “create certain sounds.” Our mouths and tongues create sounds. Letters represent sounds. That’s why phonics works as a bridge to reading, but only up to a certain point, because if your reading were simply a mirror of phonic reproduction, you’d always be a slow, inadequate reader. Everyone who becomes a competent reader is using whole language, whether they call it that or not, whether they were “officially taught” it or not.
As for writing: EVERYONE is born a poor writer. Writing is not a natural human behavior the way speech is. So EVERY generation has had “bad” (developing) writers, who may or may not become better writers, depending on their goals and experiences. There is nothing new about this.
The problem is that becoming a proficient writer is something that happens over a very long span of time, and people forget that they weren’t just born that way. Then they see another, usually younger, developing writing, and they say, “People can’t write today!” as though this were something new. It’s not.
