Shawn Lankton Online

When we were children, we were taught how to spell words. (Personally, I was never fantastic at this.) I see the value of spelling, and look scornfully on documents wrought with spelling errors. You may say, “Lucky for us, we live in the land of spell-checkers, and we don’t have to worry about that.” Ah yes. And this brings me to my point.

Spell-checking is a valuable tool. I couldn’t possibly write without it. This post is a commentary not on spell checking, but on its cousin, auto-correct. Auto-correct is the tool that changes “teh” to “the” and “freindly” to “friendly.” I used to think that this was a fantastic utility. These days I have a different take.

Auto-correct takes away the punishment for misspelling and mistyping words. As a result, you being the clever person you are, adapt and start to exhibit more careless behaviors. After years of training myself in this way, I realized that I could barely type an intelligible sentence when left to my own devices. I was constantly on backspace, and messed up certain words habitually.

As an experiment, about six months ago, I decided to go on an auto-correct hiatus. I disabled it in all programs. Furthermore, I made a promise to myself not to right-click misspelled words to get the correct spelling. Now, if I type a word wrong, I fix it. If I don’t know how to spell a word, I look it up. The results are fantastic.

My typing accuracy has improved dramatically, and I am learning to spell again! Words that I noticed I never *ever* spelled right such as “available” (I always did “avaliable” and auto-correct fixed it) have come back into the fold. Maybe its not necessary. Maybe I’m just a purist. But I like that I can type again.

For a about a week now I’ve been on a mission to remove two words from my vocabulary: “cool” and “sucks.” I think these words are completely non-descriptive and their inclusion in the vernacular promotes imprecise speech and a general under-utilization of this beautiful menagerie of words we call the English Language.

I find these two words offensive, but they are a habitual part of my everyday speech. As such, I require a constant reminder to stay focused and choose appropriate, descriptive alternatives when expressing myself. To give myself this focus I decided to use a variation of a technique employed by author Tim Ferris (whose book should be arriving at my door any day now).

This technique involves wearing a bracelet. Its purpose is to remind you not to do whatever it is you wish to stop. When you slip up, you change which wrist the bracelet is on. My goal is to make it one full month without “cool”-ing or “suck”-ing. So far I’ve only been able to go a few days at a time, but its getting easier and easier. I’ll post a follow-up when I finally succeed!