About 13-14 years ago, as a kid, I remember watching a news program where they were showing off the latest in technological innovations. One of them was the spellchecker. A reporter typed out some misspelled text. Then he pushed a button on the keyboard, and the computer pointed out the wrong words. At the time, this was amazing; a computer having the power to correct spelling. Wow!!
Now this technology is all too familiar and all too often abused. I remember having spelling tests in English class, studying and memorizing words like chlorophyll and sacrilegious. Nowadays I find myself doubting my spelling abilities and relying too much on the Google “Did you mean:” or built spellcheckers in Firefox and Word. I copy paste most of my posts into Word to make sure I’ve got the spelling correct. This is sad. And this has to change.
After taking a French class, I realized just how bad my English spelling was, but I also realized how I can improve it. Learning French opened my eyes to something different, something I didn’t learn in any of my other classes. This is because in most of my classes, I had previous knowledge of the material; I might have encountered it in the past, in some shape or form, but not in this French class. Everything was new and the only way I could learn was to memorize. For the most part, I didn’t have any previous knowledge that I could use. I couldn’t use a spellchecker because I didn’t know if the correct spelling was the real word, or something similar. I just had to commit it to memory.
This is exactly what I need to do with English. I have to stop relying on spellcheckers and try to commit some of the spellings to memory.