Is spellcheck really your friend?

[mamculuna]

Great lines from student papers--although I've warned them about this, they still don't think critically about the changes MS Word suggests. And yet maybe spellcheck can think more than we guess:

"Gregor wakes in the mourning to find he's become a beetle"

"The narrator goes to a distract of shops in search of Zaabalawi"

Comments

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

You should see what happens when they dive into a dual-language dictionary for foreign language class!

I will admit that only having heard the title, I did write "Morning becomes Electra" on purpose on a high school test, once.

Also, in that second one if the narrator took a taxi, was he driven to distraction?

[wallynotorious.livejournal.com]

In my high school freshman computer class, they tried tripping us up by making us type a sentence that uses a word twice in a row, like "They tell you you should eat burritos." Then we used spell checker, and it suggested removing one of the "you"s. It tripped up most people, but I foresaw it, and did not just click "change" for every suggestion of the spell checker.