MS Word: It's Just Trying to Help, But Is It Helping?

Today I tutored a student in the Writing Center who was very dependent on Word's autocorrection and spelling suggestion features (we worked on her essay on her laptop). It made me think about our class discussions about students' computer access in general and whether students who have no access to computers have to write their essays by hand. If students write by hand, their spelling won't be automatically corrected, they won't see a wiggly red line under words with typos, and they can't right-click to get a handy list of thesaurus suggestions. That way teachers can see exactly what spelling and grammar problems their students are making repeatedly. But if teachers receive papers that have been automatically cleaned up by Word, they'll never know which spelling and grammatical issues their students need help with.

So writing papers by hand actually might not be a bad thing; of course, this would only be the case if teachers are carefully combing their students' handwritten essays for errors and taking the time to work on recurring problems.