I recently discovered that I’m a much worse speller than I used to be. The culprit is obvious - computers make it too easy to correct our mistakes. In school when making mistakes we’d have to rewrite each word until it became ingrained but these days all we do is just click on the suggested fix without a second thought. There’s nothing there to help me retain the mistake so I continue making it.

This realization made me uncomfortable so I’ve adopted the hybrid strategy of retyping every word that I make a spelling mistake on. It’s never going to be as good as using pen and paper but it’s much better than picking a word from a dropdown menu. There are tons of behaviors that technology has made obsolete but that should not be the reason to abandon those skills. For the same reason that having math skills helps us in daily lives it’s important to hold on to the basic skills we learned as children.