I’m the father of a teenage boy, so I experience this firsthand. My daughter has a mobile phone and when she sends us a message on WhatsApp spelling It’s usually the least. What is important for him is that the message is understood, no matter what. We make an effort at home about this, but even though he is a little more careful with his messages to us, things get out of control when he communicates with his friends.

And by the way, these messages also destroy spelling rules. My daughter isn’t the only culprit who does this: I also type differently on my cell phone and often allow myself not to use questions or exclamation marks, and I also use capital letters or accents unevenly.

On-screen mobile keyboards may be an excuse, but in reality they haven’t been for a long time. Writing with autocorrect systems and keyboards swiftkey They allow us to continue adhering to Spanish spelling rules without too much trouble, but the truth is that we seem to forgive everything on mobile.

At Android Authority they recently recalled how something similar happened in the United States. The author claimed that people do not use punctuation very much. However, one of the reasons, besides laziness, was the poor accessibility of the iPhone’s virtual keyboard – 5 out of 10 people in the US use it, compared to almost 9 out of 10 among teenagers – which does not make it easy to access to this point. or comma.

Farewell to punctuation marks

In fact, the iPhone’s default keyboard hides these symbols below the numpad key; this requires more and more clicks to add a period or comma. There’s a quick method to access these (hold down the “123” switch and swipe to the icon you want), but it’s still not that direct an access. If you want to write well, the work piles up. and those extra clicks can be very heavy. You can go to all this trouble to add a question mark, but for a period or a comma? How lazy.

On Android, keyboards usually include these symbols and therefore the problem is not that serious or obvious, but still users often fall into the same laziness. If we do not do this with periods and commas, we can also do this with other elements of our spelling, such as emphasis or capitalization. If we do not use the automatic spelling rule, many words will be written without following the spelling rules because it is faster and more comfortable to write this way.

Young people are probably the ones with the most licenses for mobile phones and instant messaging. They no longer just avoid using punctuation, diacritics or capital letters: misspell the words with an ax They confuse els, Greek ies, bes, and vee more often than older people. The question is whether this will harm them in the future. Experts were concerned in an article published in El País at the end of 2022, and have since pointed out in the conclusions of the Pisa 2018 report that reading – directly related to writing and spelling – is one of the pending subjects of students.

Future AI assistants (Apple Intelligence on iPhones, Gemini on Androids) are likely to suggest a solution that will result in the message being transformed and corrected.

Apple’s own announcement two weeks ago hinted at something exactly like this, but in this case it turned an employee’s overly informal language into a very professional message that surprised her boss. It’s worrying that in the end we don’t have to put in the effort to write well because an AI is doing it. It may be inevitable, yes, but I insist: it is also worrying.

in Xataka | Those who correct other people’s spelling mistakes are idiots. science says this