How Do You Spell That?
July 11th, 2007Learning, Life, Microsoft, Musings, Rants, School, Techie, Technology, Tidbits, Tips, Writing.
On certain days, part of my work involves reviewing documents. Sometimes that just means checking if the content is right and logical, but on challenging days that can go even into the minor detail of spell checking and term consistency over several documents. Yes, we have spell check on MS Word, but for technical documents, MS Word just isn’t cutting it. Manual—and here I mean ‘error-prone’—inspections take a lot longer. I tried this thing out on the net and I got a hundred! Anyway, that should be another story about taking online quizzes.
I remember receiving a tip on how to proof documents by reading them backwards. Start at the end of the sentence and then read each word. It supposedly makes you really read the words and understand them independently of the sentence. It has already been proven that we can understand sentences and even words with missing letters, conjunctions or articles.
Wrong spellings for documents and publications may be inevitable as the number of published works increase, but one thing sure is annoying—wrong or rather purposely shortened words in text messages. I have a couple of younger cousins who send me very annoying messages, it’s not the content, but rather the delivery that is very annoying! Try these:
1. PO (the local honorific ending for a phrase/sentence addressed to seniors) — there is no ‘h’ after the ‘o’, there has never been and regardless of the ‘h’ being there or not it will still sound the same.
Couple it with spelling/writing it as ‘p0h’, this word doesn’t sound so respectful anymore. It also occupies one more character in your message, see #2.
2. 160 Character limit — regardless of if you fill this up or not, it’s still the same charge, 1 message ~ 1 Php. Could you spend a bit more time in twiddling thumbs so that the person on the other end doesn’t have to play anagrams to decipher your message.
3. SMS shortcuts in email — on a normal keyboard you have at least 101 keys versus the mobile phones’ 12. There is one key for every letter so it is a lot easier to type whole words on a normal keyboard so why do you need to condense them into an even shorter sentence? There’s also enough space for all those vowels! Paper is easier on my eye than ‘ppr’ and so is conversation rather than ‘cnvrstn’.
Whatever the case, messages, as they are intended for others’ use must be sent in a clearly readable manner. I try to make this blog as reader friendly as possible, otherwise I would have written everything in Klingon! 
I agree that the word “po” does not come with an “h” and that we should go back to spelling words the way they should be. Those short cuts not only makes the person typing them less proficient in spelling but also the reader too. Being exposed to the wrong spelling can sometimes create a visual memory and so you might end up remembering that wrong spelling instead of the correct one. Its like cigarette smoking…its not just the smoker who is affected, even the one taking in the second hand smoke is affected too..and sometimes its even more dangerous.
I’ve also seen a rise in the use of ‘q’ for ‘ako’ the local equivalent of the English word ‘me’. SMS messages are really getting more and more difficult to decipher.
OTOH, I only notice these excessive shortcuts among the teens and the fresh graduates. Does this pose an even greater threat to English proficiency or even spelling proficiency?
Thank you! I can’t believe how crazy all this texting has gotten. I see people texting while driving! I also read that teen spelling ability is at an all time low and texting is being blamed.
What Corinne says makes complete sense. You create a visual memory of the word and pretty soon, you don’t remember how to spell the word correctly. It will be interesting to see where this takes college entrance test scores.