Bill Gates is my God in this regards. I didn’t learn how to spell when I was a kid in school. I am not sure why, I remember something about the different ways that they decided to teach for a while and apparently there was a load of us in that generation who did not learn to spell. Perhaps it was because I never studied, or there was something in my brain that did not work well with spelling, I don’t know the reason.
So I left school at sixteen and could not pass the English test to join the police. I was good at maths and all the stuff that is required from the “other side of my brain.” Not being about to spell was something that caused me a fair amount of shame and embarrassment. I would do my best to never have to write something in front of anyone, to hide my lack of ability.
Strangely, at the same time I loved writing, making up stories, I even went through a phase of writing songs, (oh my god I wrote them and made my young brothers listen to me sing them). I tried many times during my crazy teenage years to write stories, but they were not good enough or just a bit too dark.
Then during the eighties I first came into contact with a software program called Ability, it had a little spell checker. But then Bill Gates, (my saviour), quickly followed that with Microsoft Word, and my writing world opened up. I could write letters and such, without the worry of being able to spell everything correctly.
Since then I have studied at university and below, spelling has been the least of my problems, getting the work finished tends to focus the mind.
I have found though in my life it has become less of a handicap when I don’t think of it that way. I treasure my imagination. That is where the real gold is. When I have a problem that is often where the solution comes from.
So thank you Bill Gates – spell checker – a huge improvement to my life.
No related posts.
