Without a doubt, autocorrect is a two-edged blade, and as an English major, I really don’t know where to come down on the subject. Certainly on smart devices with touch screens, autocorrect is essential–typing without tactile feedback is quite difficult (especially when your thumb is big enough to cover four letters at a time). It makes typing faster (for some) and helps those who are spelling deficient get their message across. While all these affordances are designed specifically to aid the user, there are some pretty severe drawbacks that pop up as well.

At its core, autocorrect is supposed to guess what you want, and to its credit, it’s pretty good. Nothing is perfect, though, and like many technologies, we only notice them when they go wrong. For me, my autocorrect pet-peeve is “Well” vs. “We’ll.” Because it often starts a sentence (“Well, I’ve given thought to…” or “We’ll meet tomorrow,” my phone can’t rightly guess what I’m saying, so there’s about a 50/50 chance it’ll choose the right one. What really surprises me however, is that my phone never adjusts it contextually. Allow me to elaborate: in some instances, my phone will autocorrect incorrectly, but then re-edit it to the correct word once it “sees” the context in which I’m writing. Strangely enough, this never seems to happen with “Well” vs. “We’ll.” I can’t think of any sentence where “We’ll” will start the sentence and then immediately be followed by a comma, yet my phone thinks this is perfectly fine.

Well, okay. If I overlook this one constraint, it’s not so bad. But the thing is, I can’t overlook it. It’s not just a matter of going back and fixing it. No, the phone doesn’t even let me do it. I’ll take the apostrophe out of “we’ll” and my phone will immediately autocorrect it back. This inevitably leads to a power-struggle between me and my phone, where both of us insist we’re right. Usually after the third attempt or so, my phone will get the idea and leave it correct, but the victory is pyrrhic and ultimately, I’ll end up spending the better part of a minute trying to type one word.

Autocorrect is a tool, and like any tool, knowing how to use it (and when to use it) is often more valuable than the feature, itself.