Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Me and Spellcheck

I am a lousy typist. I have trouble keeping my eyes off the keyboard and my hand never stays in the correct position for very long and I end up with a string of gibberish. It all started in the seventh grade when I had my typing class. My parents insisted that we take typing because it would serve us well in the future. If they only knew!!
Anyway, we had to type different strings of letters from a book that was propped up next to the typewriter. I hated that book and worse I hated timed tests. I had a lot of trouble typing then and I never got any better.
In college, typing a paper was the worst. No backspacing to rid yourself of those silly mistakes all typists make. No white out until I was a senior. We used to have little bits of paper with chalk on them so you could type over your mistakes but if you typed a line of gibberish as I still do...you were out of luck and had to start over. Usually that happened to me after I had typed three quarters of the page perfectly. Needless to say, it took forever to type a paper and I always avoided it until the last minute which was really counterproductive.
You had to do those footnote things too. There were a million rules and I never did figure the whole thing out. I was so happy when my classes required more presentation and less paperwork.
Then came computers. I still was a reluctant typer for all the same reasons. Except now you could backspace errors. I love that and do it all the time(about thirty so far just in this text)!
The best thing though is spellcheck. I love it that I don't have to worry about spelling all that much. If I make an error the spellcheck will catch it and with one touch of a button--it is respelled correctly. It is heaven!
I only have one bone to pick with spellcheck. When I type "dont" and press the key to spell it correctly the first choice in the box isn't "don't". It's "dint." What the heck is that all about? What kind of word is dint? I never heard of such a word and I can't believe that is the first choice. If I type "cant" instead on "can't" the first choice in the spellcheck box isn't "cint."
Who wrote this program anyway?
I kind of have lost faith in spellcheck because of it. If it doesn't know that I probably mean "don't" how can I be sure it knows how to spell, say...Albuquerque?
If I dint know better, I'd think first graders wrote it!!!

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