I’ve turned off “auto correction” on my iPhone and it’s a godsend. I still get predictive suggestions and spelling correction. But I no longer have to fight with autocorrect and end up with wrong but similar words in my emails and texts.
When the iPhone first arrived in eight years ago we needed autocorrect because we lost the keyboard. We were nervous anout the loss of physical targets for our thumbs to hit. Many early iPhone reviewers complained about the perils of “typing on glass” and I still see email signatures asking my forgiveness for the author’s use of a phone without buttons.
After nearly a decade of glass typing my thumbs are well trained. I type almost as fast with two thumbs as I do with 10 fingers. Every once in a while I try one of these smart mini keyboard attachments and I’ve discovered I can’t type on a phone with real keys. Physical buttons sized to fit a modern smart phone form factor are just too cramped for my thumbs to fly like a virtuoso pianist.
Autocorrect has been slowing me down and embarrassing me for ages. It transforms “can’t” into “can” and non-western European names into insults. Autocorrect wants me to spell the name of my company, Viacom, in ALL-CAPS. I don’t understand that one. Maybe in world where Apple’s autocorrect text engine gets its data VIACOM is the correct way to type it. But not in my world.
And that is the big issue with autocorrect. We each have our own style of spelling and grammar. These stylistic variation enrage the grammar police but give our text personality and nuance. Autocorrect enforces uniformity and hurts out ability to express our ideas in an idiomatic fashion that allows us to create personal and community languages.
Humans are born as language creation machines. We develop new words that express our POV on both new ideas. We repurpose old words to express new concepts while referencing tradition. Autocorrect messes with our ability to say what we mean and mean what we say.
I’ve been communicating without the mediation of Autocorrect for about a week now. I’m typing at about the same speed. I’m making less causal mistakes and “speaking” in my true voice. I’m not fighting with an annoying helpful AI trying guess at what I mean. The only downside so far is that my “I” are longer capitalized by magic. I had to relearn to tap the shift-key.
— Typed without regrets on an iPhone with autocorrect disabled. All mistakes are my own.