Smartphones are causing People to Dumb Down

I was used to typing on a Qwerty keyboard and having my phone to highlight any misspelled words.  I would then go back and correct the spelling errors with or without the spellcheck application.

Now, the smartphones seem to love to "autocorrect." They alter the spelling of words without notification to the user.  The "Autocorrect" function is leading to the use of extra text messages to clarify and/or correct previous text messages. i.e. "dazzling stream" was supposed to have read "*data stream."

Of course, I am told that there is a phone setup option to turn the "autocorrect" feature off, but I have not attempted to modify my settings as of yet.

For those of us who have gotten frustrated with the touchscreen keyboard, we now use the "voice to text" function.  I prefer to speak to the smartphone and then go back and do some minor editing.  This is sad because I still have a Blackberry with the Qwerty keyboard as a backup phone and found myself getting lazy about the concept of typing versus voice conversion.

A friend even mentioned that handwriting correspondence now requires more time and thought because we as a society have gotten away from stationery and formal handwriting without all the acronyms.

I really encouraged people to buy more stationery and write more formal letters to maintain their spelling, grammar, and vocabulary.