So I can pay more attention to what I am doing.
Auto-correct sounds like such a good feature of technology, doesn’t it? Well I thought the same but one day, after some thinking, I realized that I was actually being automatically corrected… A LOT.
My proper nouns were being capitalized for me (it really is a pain to manually capitalize the letter “I” over and over again), my words with their “i” and “e” placement were being placed correctly, words I didn’t even spell close to correctly were being adjusted. All to make me seem like a competent and smart person who knew how to use my words, letters, and apostrophes correctly.
When you really think about it, this is all a farce.
I am not the well-spelling person that my phone lets me make myself out to be and as such I felt incongruent. Really who I am a guy who makes mistakes, I make mistakes ALL the time– this perfect speller I present myself to the world as isn’t the true me.
Besides auto-correct framing me as a perfect speller it also has other detrimental effects.
I was losing my ability to actually know how to spell words. All I really needed was to use the word properly and input enough letters for the technology to take over and replace it correctly– this does not actually promote brain power, it degrades it. Why need to know how to spell a word or which words need to be capitalized? Why need to know all 100% of that information when you could get by only knowing 40% of it?
All those years in school, all those lessons to nail down how exactly words are formed and how to figure out their proper spelling just by sounding them out were now wasting away due to the advent of auto-correct. My teachers would not be happy, and the other people in my life reading my writings where auto-correct wasn’t available would not be happy either.
For my folks in the business world, how do you feel if you send something out with spelling errors like that? Usually you don’t because you check your work and really maybe you check it two or three times, but there are now spell-check/auto-correct and even grammar correct functions nowadays across all technology. You all do realize that how you type is a direct reflection as to who you are as a person right? Well yeah, of course you do and so does everyone else, otherwise auto-correct wouldn’t have been invented and its use wouldn’t be as widespread as it is today.
I turned off my auto-correct function to force me to re-learn how to actually capitalize/spell out words.
I turned it off to keep my mind more present when I’m typing. I turned if off so that I would have to do the work and could know what I typed was correct rather than relying on technology to correct me. Essentially I do it so that I’m presented with a constant brain workout.
Do you like being corrected in real life? Maybe so. In my experience I’ve found that most people take a defensive/hostile stance when being corrected, why not go ahead and apply this to auto-correct as well.
Give this a try, really. Turn off your auto-correct for a week, see how you really type.
Maybe you don’t need to live with auto-correct off, but I would wager you would really be surprised at the state of your typing without it. You would really be surprised as to how often your fingers are only vaguely in the right positioning and what a crutch auto-correct really is for you.
Take the time to type correctly on your own. Know how to spell your words. Be smart and pay attention to what you’re doing, and don’t let auto-correct run your life. Sure it saves you time, but is it really worth it if you can’t really spell when you don’t use it?
All the best,
FCP 🙃
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