Don’t Let Spellcheck Ruin the Writing

“Mrs. Yung, why is this wrong?” Emily asks me during class, staring at her laptop screen. A wavy green line floats below a phrase, again interrupting the first draft of her slice-of-life essay.

“We’ll figure it out later. Stay in the zone,” I respond, hoping she can quickly return to her mind’s creative bliss and continue drafting her essay. As a writer and teacher, I know how difficult it is to express my ideas exactly the way I need to. This zone, this creative bliss — whatever you want to call it — that I must reach to accurately express myself holds the true essence of meaningful writing.

However, it’s hard for students to reach that creative bliss during drafting when spelling, grammar, and mechanics — editing tasks that should occur near the end of the process — interrupt the early stages of writing.

That’s why I tell my students to ignore spelling while drafting and even during revision. I tell them to ignore the comma issues and the capitalization questions. And while they’re at it, ignore any other “helpful” suggestions that Google Docs or Microsoft Word offers them. Heck, disable these extensions if necessary.

I know, I know. How am I ignoring all those blatant errors? How am I allowing violations of the most basic of writing skills to remain on the page? Here’s how: because it’s more important to me that Emily expresses her idea, clarifies her position, defines her truth.

Honestly, what would you rather read: 1) a clean, properly edited piece that reveals little about the author or really anything at all, or 2) a clean, properly edited piece that succinctly expresses the author’s important ideas using her own singular voice? Obviously, the point of writing is not to showcase punctuation prowess, but to share the writer’s view of the world.

Because let’s face it, Emily will eventually get to the editing. 

When editing happens via peer response, conferring with me, or multiple proofreads, she’ll catch the missing comma, the misspelled word, the glaring run-on. She’ll choose the hyphen over the dash. In fact, those easy fixes will solidify her piece because she nailed down her ideas early on. They’re present, in full bloom, explained, and supported because Emily ignored the silly distraction over a comma in her first draft.

True, waiting until nearly the end to edit is difficult for my middle school students. They just want to get the assignment done. They figure that if they tackle the editing, they can call it good and hand it in. If you need some ideas for writing assignments that cause students to want to explore their ideas, check out this post from my website: Writing Contests Deliver Student Buy-In.

Spellcheck interrupts the deep thinking that occurs during those blissful “zone” moments when my students explore their thoughts, write them down, question them, tweak and retweak them, whisper them back to themselves, and then re-enter them the same way they were entered five minutes earlier, finally satisfied with the way their thoughts sound.

Those moments are when my students realize that writing isn’t about commas, spelling, and capitalization. It’s about themselves, their beliefs and hopes, their insecurities and pet peeves, their dreams. Don’t let spellcheck ruin that.

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