There I am hanging out with a couple of the brothers in our office when the president of my fraternity gets an email about this upcoming spelling bee. Immediately he turns to me and says, "Hey Red, you like to write so we are putting you in this spelling bee." Seems like a pretty justifiable reason to me. That is until I realized I have a way better shot at defining a word than spelling it.
If you reflect on English 401 with all those creative assignments, you can probably recall a lot of red squiggly lines under many words. Well, I too am victim of this lazy function called spell check. When a word comes across that needs to be changed, do you take the time to see what you did wrong? NO! You just click the option given to you and move on with your day.
Well, let me tell you about why this screwed me. This spelling bee has grown to attract a fairly large crowd. Probably a lot more than that spelling bee you participated in back in second grade. Most people wouldn't even want to get up and speak in front of that many people, let alone try and spell some hard word!
The thing is, I didn't get any hard words. First round up was almost a joke round. One contestant did get asked to spell schizophrenia (yes, I just used spell check) and got it correct. Yes, she did win the spelling bee. My first word was "onion," nailed that one. Feeling confident, I went into round two with my shoulders high. Except round two brought a real challenge. The word, "recipe." Somewhere along the lines I think I may have said some numbers...I don't know what happened, but it wasn't pretty.
Moral of the story, just because you like to write doesn't particularly mean you know how to spell, particularly when you rely on spell check.
