Julie Heng
The Brownell Beat
Brownell MS
1st Place
MS Division, News Writing
In-Depth Feature
It waits, in the electronic devices of most teens, like a tiger stalking prey. It is slowly forcing us to realize that spelling and grammar skills are diminishing… writing is gradually being annihilated by AutoCorrect.
Nowadays, the average teen sends over three thousand texts a month. Since most smartphones are AutoCorrect-enabled, less attention is being paid to small errors in writing.
Even the majority of Brownell is facing the challenge of not using AutoCorrect. About 75% of Broncos who text admit they use it.
According to a story on Atlantic.com, a 2005 research analysis was conducted as evidence that high-scoring SAT or GMAT students missed more errors when Microsoft Word’s spell check was turned on. The subjects missed twice as many errors when the squiggly lines were unavailable.
In another study, researchers at Florida State University gathered volunteers aged 19-22, and gave them writing tasks to see how AutoCorrect was affecting the new generation. They were asked to compose a text, email message, and Facebook status on their iPhones, then complete a survey.
The study found that there were four types of possibilities in which AutoCorrect may take over. The most common mistakes came from accidentally hitting the wrong key, but many faults occurred from misspellings as well.
The most concerning result was that in the survey, several subjects reported half the number of mistakes that AutoCorrect actually changed for them. One teen reported in the survey that he had been corrected 6 times, but in reality AutoCorrect took over 18 times – triple his belief.
This suggests that people are becoming less aware of their mistakes… oblivion that may cost writing skills.
Alyssa C., eighth grader, uses AutoCorrect because it allows her to express what she wants to say much quicker and easier. However, this sometimes makes writing in class more difficult. “Sometimes I find myself writing acronyms, then erasing it and writing the whole word,” she says.
Why might students want to disable the instant spelling and grammar function on their phones? Obviously, language can slowly deteriorate.
Also, AutoCorrect fails are becoming widespread trends – to be both laughed and cried at.
In 2012, a high school student in Georgia hurriedly texted “gunna be a west hall today” to his best friend. His iPhone did not recognize the vocabulary and changed the word “gunna” to “gunman”. By sending this message, he essentially caused the lockdowns of two schools.
Many texts are just horribly funny yet horrifying. Websites and apps are collecting the most epic corrected fails of all time. Words that make absolutely no sense in context can be sent with an easy click just because the writer neglected checking their words. These can cause more than momentary confusion among texters as well.
Guess what? There’s even a board game now dedicated to the software’s utmost fails in which the player decides: truth or fiction.
Some argue that since AutoCorrect is always reading over texters’ shoulders, it is helpfully adding usually-extinct apostrophes in messages. The software, therefore, is saving the little ’ from disappearing altogether. “It is indeed a threatened species!” the Apostrophe Protection website warns.
Perhaps it’s time to manually adjust AutoCorrect. Just by texting to friends, teens are losing their basic English abilities. Besides, to prevent the unseen parasite of AutoCorrect from changing our language skills drastically, one only needs to switch off the setting.