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When spell check first came out, it was a wonderful thing. Those nice squiggly lines showing us our typos was glorious. I’m a really good speller but I do make typos so having that visual indicator was great. For some reason I can spot typos a mile away in anyone else’s writing, but my own are completely invisible to me.<\/p>\n
Then came auto-correct. At first we heralded it as a revolution, a time saver, something about which we rejoiced. Then came the humorous auto-correct stories. We mocked it, we rejoiced in other people’s failures, but we secretly grew to depend on it more and more.
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\nIn spite of these great tools to find our mistakes and correct them, my blog posts are often riddled with mistakes. I’ve mentioned that I love it when people point them out because I simply cannot see them in my own writing, unless I read them out loud and I’m too lazy to do that ahead of time. <\/p>\n
Recently I started using Telegram for my messaging app and oddly the Mac app doesn’t have auto-correct, while the iOS and web apps do. At first I thought that was a bad thing, but then I realized how freeing it was. I love to write things like, “I’m sooooo jealous” with 17 o’s, but auto-correct would always want to change that. I like to write prolly instead of probably. I don’t know why, it just makes me happy. I might want to write gonna instead of going to, but stoopid auto-correct won’t let me. Oh yeah, I also like to write stupid with two o’s instead of a single u. In Telegram I was free to spell the way I wanted to spell.<\/p>\n
I’ve been running with auto-correct turned off on my Mac for about a week now and I LOOOOOVE it! It’s as wonderful as I hoped it would be. You know how I’m always saying that I love it if people tell me about typos in my blog posts? I really think you will see fewer mistakes now because I’m in control now. I think with auto-correct on, Apple changes my typos to real words it thinks I meant to type, so I wasn’t getting the squiggly lines that told me I made a mistake, so I couldn’t see the mistakes. That’s my theory anyway. It got put to the test this week with Steve checking my AppleTV post, and he found one typo (he usually finds a lot more) and it was me just ignoring<\/em> the squiggly line. <\/p>\n Armed with my new freedom, I raced to my iPhone and turned off auto-correct there too. I figured it would take some getting used to so I kept it off for about 3 days\u2026and I couldn’t STAND it! Back when Steve Jobs, in talking about how to type on iPhone, said to “just trust it”. Many mocked him for that and it took me a long time to trust it, but it really does type remarkably well if you just let it do its thing. Auto-correct off on iOS was a disaster, even though I could tap and hold a word to choose a correction. It took me twice as long to type out a single sentence without it.<\/p>\n I don’t know if anyone else is like me in this, but I throw it out to you. Really think about whether auto-correct helps you or whether it constrains your creativity. Don’t be a slave to auto-correct!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When spell check first came out, it was a wonderful thing. Those nice squiggly lines showing us our typos was glorious. I’m a really good speller but I do make typos so having that visual indicator was great. For some reason I can spot typos a mile away in anyone else’s writing, but my own […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[147],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-posts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7327"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7330,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7327\/revisions\/7330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"turning](\"https:\/\/podfeet.com\/NosillaCast\/NC_2015\/NC_2015_11_01\/spell_off.jpg\")
That gave me an idea. Why am I a slave to auto-correct? Why have I accepted this tyranny? I went hunting in System Preferences, Keyboard, Text, and found a lovely checkbox that said “Correct spelling automatically”. Note that I’m still letting it check my spelling so it still tells me I’m an idiot if I put too many o’s in the word “so” but it doesn’t change<\/em> it to what it thinks is best.<\/p>\n