Who needs writing, reading, and ‘rithmetic when you’ve got SpellCheck?

In grade school, I always took home the Best Handwriting award and I was pretty darn proud of it, too. But once they took handwriting off the report cards, working to perfect those loopy “l”s and soldier straight “t”s lost its appeal — when the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association (WIMA) celebrated National Handwriting Day last Tuesday, I didn’t exactly bring out the noisemakers. In anticipation of the big day, fellow skeptic John Tierney, in hisNew York Times column, posed the question, “Why bother with handwriting?” Although plenty of readers responded, lauding the sentimental value of a handwritten love letter or detailing the cognitive benefits of good handwriting, even I have to admit, it’s a lost cause. As much as it pains me to say, the honored art of penmanship is a thing of the past.

And handwriting isn’t the only “traditional” skill that threatens to become obsolete under the shadow of technology. Take spelling, for example. After all, as long as you’re remotely close, SpellCheck will automatically correct your spelling for you. Or if you accidentally type “daily pennsylvanina,” Google will ask, ever so unassumingly, “Did you mean: “daily pennsylvanian?” Should kids bother studying for spelling tests every week when technology says close enough is good enough?

The way I see it, as long as exams continue to feature written components, they really have no choice. Even those of us thankfully done with all the bubbling, at least up to the SAT, aren’t immune to SpellCheck syndrome. I’ve been alarmed to find myself hesitating more and more frequently during in-class essay exams: Is it 4 “s”s in “possess” or 3? Is irresistible spelled with an “i” or an “a”? What the’since when is “supersede” spelled with an “s”?! I’m afraid some skills aren’t quite as dispensable as cursive writing just yet.

Or maybe our dependence on technology doesn’t concern you so much when it’s only a matter of “i before e except after c.” But what about when it comes to writing and thinking skills? With Microsoft Word features like the Thesaurus and shortcuts like Wikipedia, I’ve come to the point where I can’t even write without my laptop. I can’t be expected to sit there picking my brain in search of the perfect word when Word is all too willing to do the work for me, or to read up on a subject when Wikipedia can give me all the main highlights at a glance. And haven’t you ever wished, while giving a presentation in class, that you could hit Shift+F7 and pop open a thesaurus window in your brain?

Pen and paper’s surely in the past–let’s just be wary that as computer brains get faster, ours don’t become more and more sluggish.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.