by Jeffrey Wright

Created on: October 09, 2009

Whether you're writing for school, as a journalist, or as an author, having a good grasp of proper spelling is critical. Being able to spell properly shows, for one, that you have good command of the language you're writing in. Another reason is that the reader wants to read what you have to say, not decipher it and then read what you have to say. I know my parents used to think I was trying to create my own language when they would read my writing.

Isn't technology amazing? We can go to the moon, fly long distances, and talk long distances at a keyboard and so much more. A lot of word processing programs, such as Microsoft Word (which I use to keep track of my word count) have spell-check programs designed to pore over your document and check for spelling mistakes. But you still have to know how the word is spelled in order to use it properly.
Like everything else that is built into programs like this, spell check, grammar check and other such things is a tool, nothing more. It does not replace the need to have good command of proper spelling habits. Largely these tools are overused, and as a result people have become lax in maintaining their good writing and spelling habits.

Dictionaries are a fantastic invention. If you don't know how to spell something you can easily look up the word and not only find out the words proper spelling, but you can also see its pronunciation breakdown, the type of word it is (such as noun, verb, adverb and so forth) and even see examples of its proper usage. This is good because you can refresh your memory from what you learned throughout school. After all, they say if you don't use it you lose it! And it's very true, not everything is like riding a bike!

Besides which, why would one want to type up a paper, and then have to run through it and see a handful of stupid spelling mistakes that need to be corrected when the writer could have avoided those mistakes in the first place by simply knowing how to spell the words he was using. Or if they didn't know, they could have easily looked the word up to be sure. Spell-check is good program to catch anything you accidentally miss, but shouldn't be used as a replacement for spelling it right in the first place or looking it up.

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