Why you can’t spell correctly again.

I knew something was wrong with me the day I spelled lying as lieing. The day I spelled redeemed as reedemed. The list of my misspelled words was endless. Many a time, they were words considered trivial. Very basic words and it got me thinking: where have I gone wrong? If you’re experiencing this (you used to spell correctly) and wondering the same, let me tell you where we went wrong. The use of autocorrect and word suggestion features are it. Many of us spend a lot of our time on our digital gadgets; texting, marketing, and advertising, and etcetera. All of which involve the use of words. Tech is very good, but could also be very harmful.

Word suggestion feature:

You will realize that with this, you don’t fully spell out the words you are typing, it dangled in front of you and voilà, you clicked! Cool right? Let’s say you were about to spell commission and you’ve only spelled ‘commi’ before the WSF brought out the possible word, it is very likely to click the word on the bar and not note the number of ‘s’ the word had. Continuous usage of this feature makes you forget how to spell words correctly. This is one of the reasons many tried hard to recollect spellings when writing on paper or spelling aloud.

Autocorrect feature:

Sometimes, you pass the word suggestion stage. As the name implied, it automatically corrects your misspelled words and many do not take time to check the right spellings later. Imagine typing renaisance and your phone changes it to renaissance for you quickly. Stakes are high that you will continue texting without noting this.

The bottom line is that you need to disable these two features but, leave the spell checker feature on. This is the red line behind every of your misspelled words. When you’ve seen this beneath any English word, correct it, and make a conscious effort to learn the right spellings. This will lower your typing speed at first, but with time, the brain will recognize this pattern, and your efficiency and speed will be restored. Remember the saying, ‘old habits die hard’? This is simply because of what the brain has registered. Today, what do you want your brain to register? Incompletely spelled and auto-corrected words that enhance poor spelling skills? Or the traditional full spellings prone to mistakes, but with practice, leading to efficiency?