Imagine, a Silicon Valley software engineer on a Saturday night, when they really ought to have better things to do, decides that the letter Z is sorely redundant and just creates confusion for everyone. Sinze zey don’t uze it, zey should loze it, zey say and remove it from Google Docs orthography checker.
Imagine the red underlying your zeroes and zebras. Having to click “ignore misspelling” every time you want to spell Analyze the way you want. How many clicks would it take for you to give up and start typing “sero sebras analysed”? A hundred? A zillion? This zealotry aside, there is a problem with letting machines spell- and grammar- check us. In case of orthography—it crystalyzes the way we write, preventing it from adapting to the way we talk.
But let’s talk punctuation. At its most basic, childish, simplistic, punctuation—is the way we breathe. It captures the way we pause, stop, wait, hold our breath in suspense, and exhale in satisfaction. Yet, a machine lacks lungs, it reads and writes relentlessly, and has to rely on rules to know which clause to comma, and which—not. And there’s nothing wrong with rules, but that—is all it’s got. It doesn’t hear the subtle pause of a semicolon, doesn’t feel the side-eye of parentheses, cannot see the way a well-placed dash merges the reader into the new lane, and how a misplaced (even if accurate) comma causes crashes.
The rules are important, and I’ll admit, I really need to know them better before I start breaking them. But I’d advise against defaulting to spell checkers and apps like grammarly. The punctuation is an art, it’s audible, visible, it is tactile, it is a part of your voice. If Dickinson could use nothing but em dashes—then so can we.
