Writing Without Stabilisers.

This post is a follow up to some discussion in the comments to my last blog post, A Neg Rep Rampage. I've made similar points elsewhere I'm sure, but a blog rant seemed like a good idea. You might disagree.

The subject is automatic spelling checker programs, the ones that give you red wiggly lines or whatever to tell you that something is up as you are typing.

Short version: I don't like them.

Long version...

At best, I see this sort of assistance as akin to stabilisers on a bike. Great to get you started and give you a feel for what cycling/writing is like, but not something to keep on indefinitely. If you have a prompt that tells you each time you do something wrong (probably, more on this below), how are you going to learn to write well yourself?

This is not to say that you should not scrutinise your writing for errors. Quite the opposite. My theory is that by relying on someone (or something) else to make that first call about whether something needs consideration means that you never develop that skill of deciding to look further into something. In easy reach of my desk I have a dictionary, a grammar book and a reprint of Fowler's Modern English Usage from, I think, 1930. The last is more for entertainment---does anyone agree with Fowler that doctress is the correct way to refer to a female doctor? I'm not at my desk now, but I have a similar set of resources bookmarked in my web browser. Whenever I'm not entirely sure of a spelling or a construction, I look it up.

This is a much more interesting and enlightening way to correct errors and leads, I think, to it being less likely that you'll make the same errors again and again. It'll also make it more likely that you'll get it correct when the spelling checker or other resources are not handy.

For example, when writing the above, I went online to check that the American English for the British "stabilisers" is "stabilizers". (I've decided to stick to British English wherever I can; many Americanisms feel wrong to me, especially (to use two examples from the first sentence of this paragraph) ending -ise words with -ize, which I find looks harsh and almost brutal, and putting punctuation inside quotation marks, which is plain illogical.) I found out that the American is, in fact, "training wheels". So I can now add this parenthetical remark so that everyone knows what I'm talking about. Spelling checking programs would not have helped with this, or at least not easily.)

Of course, then there are the standard problems that these programs cannot help you with weather/whether, your/you're, complement/compliment, uninterested/disinterested,... or tell you that "verse" is not a verb that means to play a game against.

So, I'm curious. How many people use spelling checkers in most of what they write? All of what they write of any length? Given that I accept that these programs have a possible use as you grow into writing, are there other arguments for them that I'm missing?