Today, much to the astonishment of some of you, I am thankful for Spellcheck!! I know. If you know me at all you know Im not known for my spelling (better known for my creative spelling), and if you have been reading here at all you know I am not proficient in spellcheck. I recently received some positive feedback, aka constructive criticism, and it all regarded my spelling. Little do you know, this that you read is the ultra spellchecked version of that which I write. Ever since I have been using Word writing papers, sending e-mails, and any other way that I communicate via computer processing with the world I have been thankful for spellcheck. Believe me you should be glad I use it!
Spelling, and its best friend/twin sister reading, have never been my strong suit, I have always struggled since the beginning. Somehow I have memories of doing flash cards with my mom when I was a little girl, yet something somewhere along the line did not stick. When I was in forth grade I was tested and read like I was in second grade, so I had get pulled out of class to go to a special reading class where an old lady with really bad hair, smelly breath, and what I still believe to this day fake teeth did special reading sessions with me. Let me tell you, nothing motivates a child to read more than begin called by name out of class, and forced to spend a half hour sitting with a creepy, smelly old lady! I also got to go to see a tutor during the summer, Mrs. Lackey the teacher who lived down the street. When I went to see her I always got to have a cup of tea. I would so look forward to that cup of fruity Celestial Seasonings into which I would stir probably any where between 5 and 9 tablespoons of sugar!! No wonder I didn't mind walking up there. I wonder how much of their sugar I caused that family to go through? Once I recovered to my appropriate reading level, no less thanks to the sugar, I still found my own unique ways of spelling. Then came the infamous 8th grade. You see in the 8th grade, as we were headed into high school, language arts was a big influential class, and in language arts we were required to take a weekly spelling test. In the beginning panic would issue, I was terrified of not performing well and being forced back into reading classes and meeting with a tutor, or even maybe not making it ti High School! That was until I figured out how to cheat. Yep, I cheated, flat out, my teacher was practically asking for it. Each week we took our spelling pre-test on Monday, then came Friday and our final test. The only thing was that our teacher would read the words for our final test in the same order as the pre-test, so all I had to was make a copy of the spelling words spelled correctly in the order I already know before the pretest. Then I would pretend to take the spelling test, and when it was time to hand in the spelling test quickly switch out the correctly spelled test for the one I just took. A+ !! I think he was asking for students to cheat, it was so easy, don't you? Was this really wrong? I got into Honors English, Itruely was a smart cookie, just not a good speller! What would you have done? Does cheating make you a bad person? Oh well, what's done is done! And so the poor spelling cycle continues! Very grateful that someone created spellcheck, so that I can efficiently communicate with others, so that you can have a clue of what I am talking about.
Although, it has come to my attention that I may not be fully communicating efficiently. See there are some problems with spellcheck. And the fact that I make up words doesn't help. Like when I have spelled the word SO wrong and spellcheck can not figure out what I am trying to spell, no matter how may times I try to spell the work, Spellcheck can not figure out what I am trying to say. Thats when you either call your mom and ask her how to spell it, google it, or find a new way to basically say the same thing without the problem word! The other problem stems form spelling's sister known as reading. You see, when I notice one of those squiggly red lines I right clink on the world, and when all the correct spelling options come up I read them and then choose the one that looks like it sounds right. This can sometimes lead to incorrect selection, I guess I don't really read them I basically just pick the one that looks the best, and when I reread the sentence it's hard to read what its actually written vs. what I think is written. Minus these minor discrepancies, I am still thankful of spellcheck!
Thursday, January 7, 2010
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personally, i'm interested in what you have to say, rather than how you spell it.
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