Response to J. Humphrys

Plan

overall – agree.
points to be made

agree
Text messages and auto-correct especially are messing up the younger generation because they don’t have to think about what they write – it’s already thought about. as such, it isn’t helping them use their brain.
“the spell-check (sorry: spellcheck) on my computer is happy with both [spellings]”
As computers are giving us two ways to write one word, even if you spell the word wrong, it’ll auto-correct it and you won’t learn from your mistakes.
Furthermore, people aren’t gaining the knowledge of how to spell words. if you type the first three letters of a word it’ll come up with the word without you needing to know how to spell it. It can also offer you the wrong word if you have not used enough letters or spelled the beginning incorrectly, making you think about the word you need to spell – the only good thing about auto-correct.
As such, while there are good and bad things about auto-correct, as it can give suggestions for hard spellings, it is ruining language because in real life there is no auto-correct and people will not learn how to spell.”the eyes fall on a word you’ve never seen before or one whose meaning you’ve always wanted to check”I also agree with your love of reading the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for the sake of learning because when you look through a dictionary you see hard words and ones you’ve never seen before and it gets you thinking of possibilities where you could use them. also, seeing a word constantly helps you remember how to spell it whereas with spell-check which suggests the words you use the most and as such you don’t learn new words. Similarly, thesauruses help people by giving different words that have the same meaning. they are helpful because people use the same words all the time and it is good to do something different. Predictive texting provides word ideas but not different words. As such, people don’t learn new words and use language properly and their language skills. You never hear someone say “she is surpassingly beautiful” when “very cute” is just 9 characters. Using a thesaurus and dictionary is essential, without them our language is nothing.