BY OLIVIA PASCALE-WONG
Life on Earth as we know it would be nearly impossible without the ability to use language to communicate. Evidence of the use of words and symbols goes back thousands of years. With language, comes speaking, reading, and of course, spelling. Growing up, spelling is one of the first tasks we start to conquer in school. The vast reserves of words in the English language alone prove that excellent spelling is far from easy to master. In the past 20 years alone, there have been a number of changes in perspective on the value of proper spelling.
Throughout the day, spelling is a task we constantly face. Spell check, an application program that flags words in a document that may not be spelled correctly, has become our dependable best friend. It has become second nature to depend on our smartphones and computers to correct our misspelled words. The newest features of web browsers and smart phones inform you of a mistake immediately, often even making automatic corrections. The problem with this is, how will we ever learn the right spelling if our words are routinely corrected every time?
Though spelling has not completely lost its importance, with technology at our fingertips, the knowledge of words and how to spell them are only a tap away. We have become so dependent on tools such as spell check that make our life easier, that it has come to the point that we’ve almost forgotten many tasks that were once critical to basic daily life. It is alarming how many of today’s high school and college students wouldn’t be able to write a paper without using the benefits of spell check. Maybe schools are too caught up with standardized testing to worry about their students’ grammar.
“In the past 10-20 years, the total number of distinct words has significantly decreased, which we find is due largely to the extinction of both misspelled words and nonsensical print errors, and simultaneously, the decreased birth rate of new misspelled variations.” Alexander Petersen of the IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies concluded. In other words, language is shrinking. Students should be taking it upon themselves to know and understand their spelling. It should be for their own gain, to have to satisfaction of knowing that they would have the capacity to compose a well written paper without relying on spell check to save the day. There are a plenty of online resources such as dictionary.com and thesaurus.com to help with spelling and grammar. One of the worst flaws in communication is to both misspell and misuse a word. It helps to write out both the correct and incorrect spelling of words you frequently spell incorrectly, to show yourself visually the difference between right and wrong. Then cross out the wrong spelling and re-write the word correctly again. This process can help your brain memorize and process the correct spelling by giving you a mental clue the next time you need to write the word.
As technology improves, and makes life “easier” for people, I do not see spelling improving in the future. With the resources available to us in today’s digitally driven word processing age, it is very easy to appear to be a good speller. The expertise that comes with being a seasoned expert of language surpasses the convenience of spell-check. So the next time you look up how to spell a word, take the time to remember and commit it to memory, so you can utilize it for your future endeavors.
