First posted on History Survey

In Spell-Checking To Disaster, Richard Becker summarizes the results of a study at the University of Pittsburgh,

Without grammar or spelling software, students with higher SAT verbal scores made, on average, five errors compared to 12.3 errors made by students with lower scores. Using spell-check software, students with higher verbal scores made, on average, 16 errors compared with 17 errors for students with lower scores.

Spell checkers give us a false sense of security. They make us lazy. They also have no understanding of the context of the words we use, so they cannot know when words like “there” and “to” are spelled correctly or incorrectly. I have also never met a computer grammarian that had mastered the grammar of our language.

These days I rarely write with a spell checker. Only after I have proofread everything do I give my document one final pass with a spell checker. Even then I do not assume the computer knows what it is doing. I make the decisions, often with the help of a dictionary.