Decoding my students’ assignments in the days of handwritten papers was almost always a chore. Sometimes it was because of bad or cramped handwriting. Occasionally it was due to loud and obnoxious ink colors. Every so often, however, I would get students who, in their haste, rearranged the letters in their words. Those students also often used inventive and unusual abbreviations. Their only goal was to save time, but the result was a paper that made me feel like a translator who needed to decipher text from a language with which I was unfamiliar.
AutoCorrect and AutoText came to me as a breath of fresh air. No more did I have to double-take at “becuase” or “rwite.” I don’t even have to wince at typos like “responsability” anymore. Whether people are trying to complete things within a short timeline or their ideas are just flowing too quickly for their fingers to keep up, rushed writing or typing often leads to mistakes. AutoCorrect saves time by correcting some of those mistakes automatically, so you don’t have to be concerned with going back and fixing them with any other spelling errors. It may not seem like it takes much time to correct each mistake with spell check, but all those little typos can add up to a lot of time, not to mention annoyance! With AutoCorrect, people often don’t even notice those errors have been made.
Another time saver for the hurried typist is, of course, AutoText. A quick five minute lesson on AutoText and custom AutoCorrect entries, and never again did I have to deal with those strange and unusual abbreviations. Learning that they could just insert “Sincerely,” from a toolbar persuaded my students not to just type “Sirly,” and the like. Knowing they could just type “Janu” also encouraged them to use the full word “January” instead of the less formal “Jan.” I believe the favorite among my students, however, was creating their own AutoCorrect entries. I once had a student who was writing a short story, in which one of the characters repeated fairly often, “The big black cat is sweet.” Instead of typing it out each time, she simply set up an entry of “bbc” to AutoCorrect to the full text, “The big black cat is sweet.” Oh, how much time that one AutoCorrect entry must have saved her! I also suspect that many of my unique abbreviation students set up their abbreviations to AutoCorrect to the full word, so they could keep their quick-type habits while appearing reformed. I could always tell the truly reformed from the others since I always collected a few in-class writing samples throughout the school year.
From more uniform typing to being able to type more in a shorter period of time, AutoCorrect and AutoText have helped my students and me over the years. My students have had to spend less time typing their assignments, and I have received papers that are more readable. Who could have a problem with that?
Miss Gunderson
