I graduated high school in 1997. When I wrote a paper in school, I WROTE a paper. By hand. I had no spellcheck, and programs like Microsoft Word and Apple’s Pages/Appleworks were still a few years away from being commonplace in public schools. Editing and revisions were done painfully, and rewrites just plain hurt.
Newer word processing programs underline words as you misspell them and grammatically incorrect phrases receive the same treatment. Its not a necessity to know how to spell the words you write. Is it making kids illiterate? Certainly not, but now its possible to write pages that are chock full of errors and go back through later and fix all the colorful problems. The problem that this presents is that, because public middle and high school teachers aren’t getting noticeably better, the expediency of a say, Microsoft Word 2007 (which yes, I do use), is doing young writers and students a disservice by doing all the grammatical work for them.
So its not even necessary to even know how to spell anymore, or even get the words half right, because the programs being used in school are so intuitive that they can even guess what you’re trying to say. I take full advantage of these things, but I still find myself going back through a document manually looking for mistakes. In the event that these modern word processors don’t catch something, most younger writers aren’t looking either.
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