Rob Weir wrote:
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 4:42 AM, Gerrit Schünemann <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi.
My thought is that underlining is sufficient. An article in the Sunday NY
Times (5 August) entitled
"Auto Crrect Ths" examines reasons that this would be a bad idea. If the writer
is unsure of the word
or its spelling, he can always go to Artha and look it up. (Artha offers
various suggestions if the
word is misspelled.)
If I may quote the article:
"One more thing to worry about: the better Autocorrect gets, the more we will
come to rely on it. It’s
happening already. People who yesterday unlearned arithmetic will soon forget
how to spell. One by one we
are outsourcing our mental functions to the global prosthetic brain. "
That is just what I mean to say. A word is underlined because it's misspelled.
You right click on it and
accept the suggestion. And you learn next to nothing. If you just had a marker
telling you, where the
mistake was made, that would be different.
I wonder if there is another way to turn spell checking into a learning
experience. Might it be possible,
via an extension, to monitor all words that are flagged as wrong by the spell
checker and corrected by the
user, and then give a report to the user of the most-frequently misspelled
words? If this report was run,
say monthly, then you could print that as flashcards or upload to a repetitive
drilling app, even a mobile
phone version.
OK. Perhaps not as attractive to adult native speakers. But it could be
useful for younger students as
well as language learners of all ages.
-Rob
While it is true that you can look it up using Artha (not to think about
usability), you can also look it
up in the suggestions. But you still have to check letter by letter at which
point you did a mistake,
which is quite time consuming on long words.
Rob has a point. It all depends upon how one uses the spell checking
function. For those who
use it as a crutch and don't want to learn how to spell better, that is all it will do. For those of us who
use it to improve ours, we learn as we go. We are even likely to check a dictionary (book, program on one's
computer, or online). Then we create a user dictionary of our own with the correct spelling for words not
found in the built-in dictionary. This is what I do.
It all boils down to what we ask of our spell checking function. If we ask ourselves and answer what
good can we get from using it to make us a better communicator, we will get one result. If we ask, what is the
least amount of work do we have to do when using it, we get another result. We will also have more wrongly
misspelled words in our writings.
I have seen posts complaining about not being able to spell check more than one language in a document.
Wrong question: "Why can't I .... ?" A better question: "How can I ... ?" [The answer to the latter is learn
to apply styles to words from different languages in a document. Whether they are paragraph or character
styles depends upon the circumstances.] The spell checker can be quite useful is we are curious enough to ask
how to do it.
"My 2 cents"
--Dan
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