Autocorrect has saved me more times than I can count. I rely on it to be able to text quickly and not worry too much about spelling everything right. If it gets something wrong, I just follow up with a quick “*money not monkey” message and assume everything is fine. But autocorrect has also burned me and frustrated me more than a few times.
I used to hate how often it would change words that I typed to “duck” or “ducking,” so eventually, I made a “shortcut” in my phone that would change “duck” to what I actually meant. (You know, luck.) This worked well for a while, until I moved to a home on Duck Lane. Then, I had to remove that shortcut to ensure that I didn’t tell people I lived on a very vulgar sounding street.
I also don’t understand autocorrect’s logic when it comes to what it decides to fix and what it will leave alone. For example, I can type “aminals” and it won’t change the word to “animals.” Yet it has no problem inserting words that make absolutely no sense in the context of what I’m writing, despite the fact that it can perfectly predict what I’d like to say in an email.
Most of us have a love-hate relationship with autocorrect, or should I say “love-hare” relationship? But we continue to use it because we’re creatures of habit, and if we turned it off completely, most of our messages might turn into incomprehensible gibberish. That, or we’d have to spend 5 minutes crafting a simple text in the same way that my parents do.
Despite how much you might hate autocorrect, there’s a good chance that you still use it nearly every day. According to a 2022 survey, between 40-50% of people say that they always or almost always use autocorrect to fix spelling errors. And I can’t really blame them, because 63% of people admit to consistently misspelling the same words over and over again. Plus, 61% of us judge others for making spelling errors, so we certainly want to spare ourselves from that embarrassment. (Embarrassing/embarrassment used to be one of my most frequently misspelled words, but after a year at this job, I finally figured it out without needing autocorrect.)
Even with autocorrect, however, most of us still double-check our correspondence before sending it out into the world, just to be sure. PC Magazine reports that 86% of people spell check emails, and 62% of us spell check our text messages. A whopping 92% of us also spell check documents before sending them off.
But despite how reliant we are on spell check, many of us don’t realize how much we need it. Nearly 50% of people believe that they never or almost never misspell words when they write, and nearly half believe they rarely misspell words when typing and texting.
According to the New York Post, people with iPhones have even been complaining about autocorrect “ruining their lives.” Apparently, iOS update 16.3.1, which was released in early 2023, was particularly bad at fixing spelling errors. For example, it started automatically adding “z” after apostrophes instead of an “s,” and would change words that were perfectly fine into other words (for example, food to good). Lucky for iPhone users, however, Apple was dedicated to fixing this issue with iOS 17. Whether they did so successfully, however, is still up for debate.
If you’re tired of constantly fighting autocorrect to change words back to what you meant to say or to allow you to curse instead of referencing ducks all the time, there are a few settings on your phone that may be able to help you out. The Washington Post first recommends that if you hate autocorrect enough, you can simply turn the feature off. The same goes for automatic punctuation and capitalization; these features are not requirements.
