A few months ago I turned off the autocorrect feature on my phone. It was driving me crazy. Seriously, over the edge, with tourette’s tics, muttering and cursing. I’d grit my teeth as my phone insisted I meant to say something other than what I was typing, even when using common words and phrases. And for the uncommon? I could tell my phone repeatedly that I really did mean “(insert industry acronym here)”, but it would always want to autocorrect me.
I decided to see if life would be better without my phone’s attempts to out-think me. And, so far, the results have been mostly positive, with the exception of one growing problem. My phone’s dictionary has been “learning” all of my typos, and adding them to an ever-expanding list of foreign words, which now come up as valid options when I’m typing.
Because my thumbs lack a rubber nub, for graceful and accurate tapping of each letter as I type, I often hit adjacent letters, and come up with words like “tge” and “jyst” and “yiu”. I’ve recently discovered I’m much more proficient with Swype, sweeping my thumb around the keyboard and *mostly* coming out with the right word. However (and this is a biggie), my dictionary now includes tge, jyst and yiu (among a plethora of other gibberish words). Surprisingly, those are often coming up as the primary option.
I am now going through the tedious process of making my phone “unlearn” all of these new words. As I Swype, word by word, I check to see if egregious variations are offered. If so, I stop and go through the process of deleting any that are.
I suppose the lesson here is, if you’re going to turn off autocorrect, and you’re a reckless typist, Swype might be the way to go immediately, before you’re typing in a different language. I wonder if I can default back to the factory-installed dictionary….
Have you dared to turn off autocorrect? How was that experience?
