"I'm spelling so bad," a student murmured in my fiction class last week, as we were filling out mid-term professor evaluations. "This reflects so badly," she said."Next week we'll have a spelling test," another student joked. These words came from Brandeis students sitting in a class meant to train them to be good writers. However, the fact that they could not confidently hand-write a mundane teacher evaluation does not call into question their ability to be good writers. In this generation, spelling has become a matter of simply clicking the "spell-check" button. The secret that many students are not good spellers is revealed by in-class essays and weak moments when students forget to automatically spell-check their work.

Something remarkable has happened to our culture of spelling. In elementary school, we spent so much time studying our weekly words for Friday's tests and our teachers promised we would never forget how to spell them. The aim was to be master spellers by high school. But while many students wrote their first essays in elementary school by hand, lots of people today do not even keep hand-written journals. The only thing people need to do today in order to spell well is to find the underlined words on their computer document.

Like any skill, if the ability to spell is not used, it will be lost. Our generation grew up alongside the growth of home computers, and today's dependence on word processing programs, especially the magical "auto correct" option most word processors come with, has caused our generation to unlearn how to spell.

It is important to engage actively in tasks if you want to remember how to do them. The difference between pressing "spell check" and struggling to find the word in the dictionary before copying it down is the same difference between skimming a textbook once through and taking careful notes on the reading. In both cases, students in the first scenario learn more in the long run.

When spell-checking a word electronically, I base my choice of the correct spelling on word recognition; this method does not teach me how to spell the word. I spend so little effort in trying to correct my mistake that I have even forgotten what the misspelled word was. On the contrary, there is no Spanish spell checker on my computer, so that when writing in Spanish, I have to look up the spelling the annoying, traditional way. After one or two times of looking up the word and recreating it through physically typing it myself, I do not make the same mistake again.

A major fear of mine is writing an e-mail to a professor and forgetting to spell-check it. Since Webmail does not underscore misspelled words, and I am almost out of the habit of actively recognizing spelling errors, I always have to remember to press "spell check." I have written e-mails, even very recently, which had spelling errors, but which I forgot to correct until just after pressing send. Incorrect spelling looks extremely unprofessional.

Let's not kid-few of us can spell everything correctly on the first try, but once we spell-check, we all have an equal opportunity not to look foolish. This just makes mistakes even more embarrassing. But spelling errors with professors can elicit more than shame; they can be harmful to a grade. I dread in-class essays most, which is odd because so much less is expected on these exams since we usually are expected to write whatever comes to our heads in order to beat the clock. Before such exams, I have often heard the question "does spelling count?" and a response of "yes" can be quite unnerving. Hand-held spell-check machines do exist, but there isn't time to pause on these exams to look up a problem word. As is the case in e-mail, these spelling errors look extremely unprofessional, and such errors suggest sloppiness, which can negatively affect the grade.

For the most part, bad spellers are hidden under the blanket of spell-checking tools, but from personal experience, I know that when I am writing by hand, I become nervous about presenting inadequately spelled work. While it is definitely more efficient to be a good speller, as long as students can get their hands on a spell-check program, and as long as they remember to use it as diligently as they remember to use deodorant in the morning, there will be no stink-stains on their writing.