Pardon my spelling

Kaitlin Holtzclaw
December 3, 2009
Filed under Opinion/Editorial

“You don’t need to worry about spelling, there’s always spell check.” There are just a few problems with that statement.

For spell check to work, people need to be able to get close to the right spelling of the word. They also need to be able to recognize the word when they see it. But what happens when they have no idea what the word looks like and can’t get the spelling close? When this happens, spell check is no help. The next step is to ask for help on the word, and that is not always something people maybe comfortable doing especially when it could be seen as a simple word.  So they can leave a word misspelled and then when others eventually see it, it is worse for now they risk getting picked on for it, instead of just asking for help in the first place.

There is also a problem of words sounding the same, but being spelled differently. This problem comes into play when the person spells one of the words right, but they really wanted another spelling, and they get called out for not knowing the difference. The last problem that also happens is that you will be trying to write a word and you get another one that is close to what you want, but it does not even sound the same as the word you were after.

Some things that people do to compensate for this problem is fake a momentary lapses, or a senior moment (no pun intended), to cover up their mistake.

Other things that people can do include:

Putting another word with the same meaning as the word they really want.

Try to keep spelling the word until spell check can finally help

Ask a friend

These are only a few things, so if anyone has any suggestions, feel free to leave a comment.