I used to be able to write. I’ve published both fiction and technical nonfiction. I’ve won awards for writing. Heck, I got my current job in large part because I was reasonably adept at converting Engineerese into written People-Speak, even though that’s not a job requirement of my position.
My co-workers still ask me questions daily about grammar, spelling, word use, general writing skills, or for examples of rare uses such as “affect” as a noun or “effect” as a verb. These co-workers are unaware of my shameful, insidious secret: suddenly, I suck at English. (Well, gradually I’ve come to suck at it, but that doesn’t scan as well. (Of course, neither does long parenthetical sections, but that’s the whole point: I’m bad at this!))
I swear by Og and the passing Mods that I know what the preview button does. I use it religiously. But still, either errors are forming in the ether while my work is being transmitted, the hamsters are poor at transcribing, or else I am making third-grade errors in nearly every post.
Go ahead. I challenge you to read any of my posts and not find a typo, or two, or three! I dare you!
Bletch.
I blame Microsoft. Not only is Microsoft a pretty safe target to blame for everything from terrorism to the heartbreak of psoriasis, but they make Microsoft Word. Or bought it, or something.
Word underlines my mistakes, like an ever-vigilant English teacher standing over my shoulder ready to strike my fingers with a red wavy ruler if I should misspell “psoriasis.” It stalks my run-on and sentence fragments from its cool green wavy sea.
It used to be that I had to catch mistakes myself. I didn’t knowingly stop using this skill, but it apparently atrophied as my spelling neurons realized that the red wavy thing was doing their job for them. The spelling neurons are presently being used to store ancient advertising slogans in case they’re needed for a joke that half the people reading this will be too young to understand anyway.
But it’s not just the red wavy line, no. More recent versions of Word (and by “more recent,” I mean produced since the birth of today’s college freshmen) silently fix my errors while I type! I type “teh” when I meant “the,” and it instantly vanishes back into the bitstream from whence it came, to be replaced by the “correct” version. I’m typing this in Notepad now or I probably wouldn’t even be able to type “teh.”
Mistakes are supposed to be painful, even if we define “painful” to include such relatively benevolant punishments as the red wavy line of death. How am I supposed to learn from a mistake I don’t even know I made?
The grammar checker is perhaps worse, because I am, or was, smarter than it was. I could look at Word having a hissy-fit about some construction and say to myself: “I’m right, and Word is wrong. These are exactly the words I want to use to express my meaning.”
Somewhere, deep in my brain, the grammar neurons occasionally still manage to fire off a message to my consciousness that this or that construct is just fine, thank-you-very-much.
But, to my shame, I ignore them. That green line nags at me, tweaking at my attention like a Darwinianly-disadvantaged snake failing to hide in my prose. Even though I know I am right, even though I know I am replacing good text with worse, even though I’ve promised to stop myself from doing it…I will rewrite to avoid the green squiggle. I’ve not fallen so far as to actually take Word’s often-moronic suggestions, but can that be far off?
Former masters of our typo-free domains, join me in declaring our independence from the squigglies! Let us declare ourselves free of “Check Spelling and Grammar while you type” and vow only to spell-check as a final check after we finish the document, and not to grammar-check at all. Unless we want the Fleisch-Kincaid reading-level score, of course. Then we have to grammar check. Let’s not be silly about this.
Slowly, slowly, I shall regain my ability to write. My first typo-free SDMB post is scheduled for 2013, don’t miss it!
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