Raphael Mudge has published an interesting post that talks about re-thinking the relationship with the spell checker. His post made me reflect on just how dependent I’ve become on services such as After The Deadline or the built-in spell checker inside of FireFox. There used to be a time when I could easily spell big words when writing them down on paper or saying the letters out loud. Those days are long gone. When I write content and it comes to using a big word, I’ll make the first try a good guess hoping that I got close enough to the word that FireFox will suggest the one I was trying to use.

I imagine that not writing words down on paper with pen is one of the biggest reasons for my lack of ability to spell. Grammar to me is an after thought. I also wonder if I should put myself in a little experiment where I disable all spell checkers for one week to see how I do. If anyone else is willing to go through this same experiment, let me know in the comments. We can give it a try for a week and report our findings.

Can anyone else admit that spelling and grammar checkers have become a large crutch?