Remember spelling bees: the “game” where the teacher fired random words at you and expected you to spell them correctly.
If you were good at this “game” you received a sticker, a star, or some other acknowledgment that you had mastered a valuable life skill. As it turns out, thanks to John Seely Brown (inventor of spell check), the ability to spell is not a necessary life skill; rather, it’s a quirk – like being able to name the presidents in order, or knowing who invented spell check.
Good thing, too, because unlike presidents (which can be memorized), either you can spell…or you can’t. It’s that simple. And if you happen to find yourself in the latter category:
- Whenever someone asks “is that spelled right?” You are just never sure…
- You routinely type words into a text just to check the spelling.
- “How am I supposed to look it up, if I don’t know how to spell it?” was the battle cry of your childhood.
- And “sounding it out” didn’t help at all.
- Your spelling has been corrected by a grade school kid…
- More than once.
- There have been times when you have misspelled a word so badly, even spell check couldn’t fix it.
- The problem with texting is that, between you and auto-correct, no one has any idea what you’re trying to say.
- It takes you twice as long to Google something because you never know how to spell it.
- As a result of those misspellings, you’ve gotten some crazy search results…
- Which you have definitely spent an entire workday exploring.
- You have been known to over-enunciate in order to figure out the spelling of a word.
- Forget about finding people on Facebook…
- Because that would require you to actually spell their name correctly.
- No matter how many times you’ve checked your work, there’s ALWAYS a mistake.
