iwrite - Sam Flomenhoft

Over the years, the past few decades specifically, technology has grown and improved to become more versatile, useful, and relevant to our everyday lives. With this growth have come myriad positive impacts of technology but also some negative ones. 

A common example of this is the infamous autocorrect which often distorts the meaning of text messages or even school writing assignments, which is ironic because in theory, it is a program designed to help, not hurt, the clarity of the writer's message. 

When I think of the trouble autocorrect (spell check) has caused me over the year a specific story comes to mind. 

Back in middle school, when I was in the sixth grade at SCAPA (School for the Creative And Performing Arts) for creative writing, we had printed writing assignments due once every couple of weeks. For one of these assignments I had written about Dalmatians, which is a fairly difficult word for a sixth grader to spell, so naturally, I spelled it wrong. As per usual the red squiggly line underlined the word and I right-clicked on it with my mouse, and clicked on the first corrected option (which I assumed was the word dalmatian). I printed out the paper without second thought and turned it in on time. The next day, while reading through my paper to the class, I come to find out the word it corrected to was not in fact dalmatian, but damnation, a dark word for any sixth grader to be using.

While I didn't get in trouble and this didn't really cause me too much harm, it is a comical example of how this new wonderful technology can sometime hurt us.