RE: MS will help us find the right words?

["Michael West" <mbwest -at- bigpond -dot- com>]

Edgar D' Souza  wrote:
> No, I don't mean it quite that drastically... what I meant was that
> when people rely on an electronic (or other external aid) for a task,
> instead of letting their brain handle it... the ability atrophies. 
 [...]
> 
> I think the old "use it or lose it" and "the mind is a muscle" sum it
> up neatly. Yes, productivity sometimes requires us to discard older
> ways of doing things, but where it's possible to maintain the mental
> abilities, it makes sense to do so - would you agree with that?

Well, sort of, to the extent that I believe anyone really does forget how to
spell by relying entirely on a manifestly imperfect technological aid. Silly
buggers, if they exist. I rather believe that such aids give bad spellers a
chance to improve slightly, while careful spellers are not in the least
deprived of that ability while being given a little proofreading assistance.
In fact, that notion seems absurd to me. Even a dictionary or a grammar
handbook is of use only to people who understand how to use them. If you
don't know an adverb from a preposition, then nothing in the grammar
handbook will make any sense to you anyway. It's no different if the grammar
rules or spelling rules are loaded into a word processor.

Back in the days when I wrote user manuals in longhand and handed the sheets
to a typist, any errors or ambiguities of sentence construction were as
likely to come back to me in the typed copy as not. When they did, it didn't
occur to me to go out and tell the typist she was an idiot.

-- 
Mike

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