Criticism
Some critics of technology and computers have attempted to link spell checkers to a trend of skill losses in writing, reading, and speaking. They claim that the convenience of computers has led people to become lazy, often not proofreading written work past a simple pass by a spell checker. Supporters claim that these changes may actually be beneficial to society, by making writing and learning new languages more accessible to the general public. They claim that the skills lost by the invention of automated spell checkers are being replaced by better skills, such as faster and more efficient research skills. Other supporters of technology point to the fact that these skills are not being lost to people who require and make use of them regularly, such as authors, critics, and language professionals.
An example of the problem of completely relying on spell checkers is shown in the Spell-checker Poem above. It was originally composed by Dr. Jerrold H. Zar in 1991, assisted by Mark Eckman with an original length of 225 words, and containing 123 incorrectly used words. According to most spell checkers, the poem is valid, although most people would be able to tell at a simple glance that most words are used incorrectly. As a result, spell checkers are sometimes derided as spilling chuckers or similar, slightly misspelled names.
Not all of the critics are opponents of technological progress, however. An article based on research by Galletta et al. reports that in the Galletta study, higher verbal skills are needed for highest performance when using a spell checker. The theory suggested that only writers with higher verbal skills could recognize and ignore false positives or incorrect suggestions. However, it was found that those with the higher skills lost their unaided performance advantage in multiple categories of errors, performing as poorly as the low verbals with the spell-checkers turned on. The conclusion points to some evidence of a loss of skill.
Read more about this topic: Spell Checker
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)