The ‘Auto Correct’ Generation

There is an interesting article I came across on LinkedIn discussing how spell checking software and auto-correct has led to a decline in the ability to spell. The article is posted on the BBC News website and I was finding the article pretty interesting until I came across this sentence:

[Ian McNeilly, director of the Natioanl (emphasis added) Association for the Teaching of English, said: “I think it’s an easy, knee-jerk reaction – though an entirely understandable one – to blame technology for perceived declines in a whole variety of areas.]

I could not get over the irony of the author misspelling the word ‘Natioanl” in an article about poor spelling.

The inability to spell certainly hurts the credibility of any person or organization but the same can be said about typos. This article lost a ton of credibility for me not because the author cannot spell (I am confident that they know how to spell National) but because they rushed to publish the article without taking advantage of the very software they are discussing, ultimately leading to this typo.

No matter how great or poor you are at spelling there is still the possibility a misspelling can slip through the cracks and hurt your credibility. This is even more so the case when writing for the web. It is so easy to quickly publish content on the web and that can lead to mistakes. Having tools like auto-correct and spell checking software are a necessity to catch misspellings regardless of why they occur (inability to spell or typo).

If an organization does not check and then double-check for mistakes in their web content they are asking for trouble.

How do you avoid spelling errors? As always, thanks for reading.