Re: MS will help us find the right words?

["Edgar D' Souza" <edgar -dot- b -dot- dsouza -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Thanks, Caroline - yes, I don't mean that members of this list per se
are going to lose their ability to spell if they use a spell-checker.
Sure, school children who're taught to rely on one (or a calculator)
won't learn how to spell or do math themselves. However, consider
people who've had spelling and math taught in school the old-fashioned
way, but then graduate and move on to using external substitutes for
those abilities... I don't think it's very long before they've begun
to rely more on the spell-checker and calculator than on their own
mental abilities.

Technical communication places great value on language skills, so it's
not likely that a good communicator will rely exclusively on a
spell-checker. But look at people in other professions - I have - and
you can see this phenomenon, where people gradually lose their ability
to spell. I've had post-it notes, hand-written memos and other
communications from such people display a stark contrast to their
electronic(ally generated) communications.

Edgar D'Souza (http://edgar.b.dsouza.googlepages.com/)
Check out my GIMP-Python "Tear-off" plugin, useful for tech writers,
at: http://registry.gimp.org/node/10977
===
The gene pool could use a little chlorine.



On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 3:45 PM, Caroline Tabach
<caroline -dot- tabach -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> If we look at this a bit differently, how about starting with the
> school child who from some point writes many of their papers using
> Word, and its spell-checker. In this case, the child actually never
> learns to spell correctly in the first place, as they rely on the
> spell-checker; in the same way that use of calculators from an early
> age, means they do not acquire complex maths skills at all in the
> first place. So, therefore we could be talking about not acquiring the
> skill of correct spelling, rather than losing this skill. Or, the part
> of humanity that depends on computers will no longer know how to do
> mental arithmetic or spell.
> Therefore I am not sure whether Edgar meant that the members of this
> list, who are after-all a very specific sub-set, will lose their
> spelling abilities, but that in general, regular people relying on
> computers, will at some point lose their ability to spell correctly.
> Possibly, they will never even learn how to spell in the first place.
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